It is 6.30pm in a smart open plan office in south Delhi. Sitting in a row of sound-muffling cubicles, a group of pleasant-looking young Indian graduates are talking into their headsets. Some are dressed in jeans; others in bright salwar kameez . Their customers, however, are rather a long way away, in a place where it is still lunchtime and probably cold. They are in suburban Britain, dotted across a grey island nation that from here seems remote and eccentric. The customers have rung a number in the United Kingdom to check their mobile telephone bills, or to ask about a new product. They are, for the most part, unaware that their inquiry has been routed thousands of kilometres away to an Indian call centre that serves rotis in its canteen and has a good view from the roof terrace of a giant lotus temple.
Not, of course, that there is much to give the game away. The subterfuge is magnificent. Callers are greeted with a "good afternoon" when it is already evening in India. Should the caller lob in a reference to the footballer David Beckham or the Queen Mother, Indian staff are able to give a suitable off-the-cuff reply. Nothing is left to chance.
This is Spectramind, one of India's newest and most sophisticated call centres: a place of soothing pastel colours, tasteful lighting and expensive green carpets. The four-storey building smells of fresh paint - and of colossal corporate self-confidence. Here recruits receive a 20-hour crash course in British culture. They watch videos of British soap operas to accustom them to regional accents. They learn about Yorkshire pudding. And they are taught about Britain's unfailingly miserable climate.
Each computer screen shows Greenwich Mean Time and the UK temperature, in case a staff member feels the urge to reveal that India is enjoying yet another day of sun and blue skies."They get a two-hour seminar on the royal family," says Raman Roy, Spectramind's sleek, pipe-smoking chief executive. "We download the British tabloids every morning from the web to see what our customers are reading. We make our new staff watch Premier League football games on TV. And
we also explain about the weather, because British people refer to the subject so frequently. It is a science," he adds, proudly. And it is. So much so that Britain's 3,500 call centres are justly worried that their jobs will soon disappear entirely - as more and more firms "outsource" key elements of their businesses to India. This apprehension was confirmed by a report published last month that said the Indian call centres were superior to their British counterparts. They were cheaper - costing only 35-40% as much; they had better technological facilities; they had smarter
staff.
The trend started eight years ago when American Express and British Airways transferred their "captive" customer service empires to Delhi, and then Bombay. BA was attracted by India's seemingly unlimited pool of English-speaking graduates, 25% of whom fail to find jobs. Indian graduates required starting salaries of only $3,700, as opposed to $18,500. They were IT literate, and highly motivated. The savings were huge. Gradually other British companies cottoned on. Last year Harrods shifted its store-card operation from Leeds to Delhi. It has been joined by other retailers. The insurers RSA and Axa Sun Life have recently moved elements of administration to Bangalore, India's IT capital. British unions are starting to complain. They object, in particular, to the fact that some Indian call centres encourage their staff to change their names to sound more, well, English. Thus Siddhartha might become Sid, or Gitanjali could be Hazel, not Gita. At Spectramind staff keep their original names, Roy explains: "It is not a disadvantage to be called Ramakrishna these days." It is no secret within the industry that "agents" are taught to minimise their Indian accents, to speak more slowly, and to watch the BBC news. "We don't try and teach our staff to speak with British accents. But after talking to British people they do start to sound like them," a manager, Viswanathan, admits. Even after intense training, though, some callers from Britain are impossible to understand, it seems. "We borrow tapes from the British Council in Delhi. But even after listening to them there are about 20% of callers who don't make any sense at all," says Padmini Misra, vice-president (training). That India has so many English speakers is clearly one of the nicer legacies of colonialism - so the British can hardly complain, 50 years on, that they are stealing jobs. Most of Spectramind's new recruits have been educated at English- orientated schools, and spend Friday nights watching British programmes on Star TV, India's most contemporary channel. But few have actually visited the UK. This is where Misra's crash course comes in. "We have training modules on geography, history and the monarchy, and on Britain's social structure," she says. "We teach them about British food - Yorkshire puddings for one - which would not be familiar to a young Indian fellow here. We give them quizzes on Britain and allow them to surf the net. And we tell them about what high-street shops there are."
Such are the sensitivities involved, however, that most Indian call firms refuse to discuss their methods and strive to conceal who their clients are. The United States finance group GE Capital refuses my request to look round its huge call centre in Gurgaon, on the road between Delhi and Jaipur. "Why tell our competitors how we run and manage our business?" GE handles the store- card accounts for Harrods and several major British chains. It has some 2.5m British customers, but does not believe in transparency. "Clients don't always like the customer to know that any service from them to the customer has been outsourced," says Matthew Vallance. His firm, CustomerAsset, recently opened two call centres in Bangalore and he predicts that more and more British firms will shift to India. But it is not just the UK that is outsourcing: a huge amount of what is known as "remote processing" is now being done in India for the US market. While Memphis sleeps, Spectramind's American team are busy. They are working on invoices that have
been scanned and emailed to them from halfway across the world. The US-orientated staff are trained in the nuances of baseball, and Blue "Tennessee Titans" pennants fly above their desks. "Geography is history. Distance is irrelevant. Where you are physically located is unimportant. I can log on anywhere in the world," Roy declares. His firm is not deceiving the customer, merely providing a "global servicing resource", he explains. After a successful career at American Express and GE Capital, he founded Spectramind 11 months ago. The firm now hires 150 new graduates a month, and receives 8,000 applications from one advertisement in the Hindustan Times. The number of employees has risen - from 400 to 2,000.
With the industry doubling in size every couple of months, India is fast becoming the call centre capital of the world - with a turnover, analysts predict, of $3.7bn by 2008. In a waiting room decorated with a photograph of a giant eagle - "Leaders are like Eagles. You only find one of them at a time" - applicants are comparing notes after a fourth interview.
"I've already written three exams. I'm an honours engineering graduate,"whispers one young man. He and his fellow candidates are in their early 20s. They are bright, middle class and tidily presented. They are, in short, not the kind of people who you would find in a UK call centre - not unless the bailiffs were knocking at the door, or the student loan had to be paid off urgently.
On the floor below, the British desk, which starts work at 6.30pm (Indian standard time), is still greeting callers with a "good afternoon". The shift finishes at 2.30am, just as Britain is washing up or settling down on the sofa to watch the telly. The Indian graduates are then fer ried home in luxury Toyota Qualises, through still-warm streets full of somnolent cows, yapping pye-dogs and snoring rickshaw drivers. We are a world away from Sidcup. The darkness is only broken by the flood-lit lotus temple, serene and milky white in the distance.