Outsourcing Toolkit

Young call-centre customers mistrust offshoring

Sylvia Carr silicon.com

Published: 21 Jul 2006 17:15 BST

Young people don't trust overseas call centres and are critical of companies that outsource work to offshore locations.

In a recent poll of call-centre customers in which three-quarters of respondents were aged between 20 and 29, 40 per cent believed their security is compromised by using offshore call centres.

Just over half said company location affects their buying decisions, and one in three said offshoring is bad for a business' image.

The survey was conducted earlier this year by Blue Prism, maker of an automated customer system, and Sheffield Hallam University.

Call-centre security was brought to the fore in April 2005 when three Indian call-centre workers were arrested for stealing $350,000 from the accounts of Citibank customers and then again in June of that year when a Sun reporter was able to buy sensitive information such as bank-account and driving-licence details from an Indian call-centre employee.

More recentl, Indian IT trade association Nasscom launched an initiative to set security and privacy standards for offshore operations.

It has pointed out in the past that there is fraud and cases of lax security at call-centre operations in all parts of the world.