'Big brother' watches Indian call centre workers

Express News Service
Aug. 29, 2005

When Neha Sharma reaches her office in the suburb of Gurgaon, she is frisked by the guard. Her handbag is searched and her mobile phone and any pens or notebooks are removed. Inside her cubicle, where she takes calls from American and British customers for Hero ITES, a major Indian provider of outsourced business services, cameras watch her constantly. Her phone conversations are recorded. When Sharma leaves for the day, the contents of her bag are checked again.

This is the new world - some call it Orwellian - of Indian call centers, where local workers provide customer service and technical support for companies around the globe. Following a spate of incidents where information about customers was leaked or sold, the industry has beefed up security to reassure clients that their data is safe.

“Everything you do - your tea break, how long you talk on the phone, how often you leave the office for a break - is watched,” said Sharma, 23, who recently joined the call center’s staff. She agreed to be interviewed about her work experiences on condition that a pseudonym be used.

Nilesh Kothari, chief operating officer of Hero ITES, said of the security measures, “Our clients are three of the world’s largest credit card companies and we have always followed strict norms. Although we’ve had no untoward incident, we are telling employees to be even more vigilant than before — but without putting extra pressure on them. And people have been very responsive.”

For the companies, a lot is at stake. The $5.7 billion outsourcing industry is growing at around 40% a year. More than 350,000 young Indians work in call centers for a fifth of western wages.

India is currently far ahead of other countries that also perform back office and call center work for Western companies, but it knows the lead could erode fast.

“Fears about the safety of confidential data had to be quashed. No one is prepared to take any chances given the backlash against India among American and British workers at losing their jobs,” said Ashish Gupta, head of Evaluserve, a company in Gurgaon that carries out financial analysis for American and European firms.

Call centers have introduced draconian new measures to supplement the stringent ones already in place. Workers are denied access to the Internet and e-mail.

At one Gurgaon center, the $ symbol on the keyboard has been disabled to make sure that accounts of banking clients are not tampered with. Access to certain areas of the office required a special card and password.

At ICICI OneSource in Mumbai, where workers process credit card bills and make telemarketing calls for top American and European banks, insurers and retailers, computer terminals lack drives for removable discs to prevent employees from copying or storing data.

“All our work is in financial services and so our security standards have been global from the start, but we’re always looking at ways of reinforcing them even further,” said Vrinda Walavakar, ICICI OneSource’s corporate communications director.

The National Association of Software and Service Companies, the trade group for India’s information technology industry, announced last weekthat it was beginning a pilot project to compile work histories of call center employees. The voluntary project will later expand to cover other IT workers and may be made mandatory by some companies, president Kiran Karnik said.

Even call centers that do not deal with financial services, such as those of leading PC maker Dell Inc., have strict procedures. Agents need Internet access in order to provide technical support for Dell customers in the United States. But firewalls and other protective measures block access to all Web sites except those of th client.

No cost is being spared to install the latest surveillance systems. Huge call centres that employ thousand of staffers are even planning to install scanners to ensure that miniature data storage devices are not smuggled into the office. Industry analysts say there has been a 25% increase in spending on security in the past year. This includes employers such as MphasiS, Hero ITES, Wipro Spectramind, and ICICI OneSource. ?

“There is no such thing as too much security. Even our screen savers list the do’s and don’t’s that employees have to follow. It can be irritating, but it’s a way of drumming home the message that security is paramount,” said Devashish Ghosh, CEO at New Delhi-based Wipro Spectramind. This wave of security was prompted by some recent incidents.

In June, the British tabloid the Sun said that its reporter had bought bank details of 1,000 Britons for just $15 each from a worker at a New Delhi call centre run by Infinity. The clients involved many top British banks such as HSBC, Barclays, and Lloyds TSB. The newspaper said the worker claimed he could provide 200,000 account details a month, including those of US citizens.