A Wake-up Call for Call Centers?

Though India is touted with titles such as “Most favored outsourcing destination”, “Leading outsourcing location”, “Premier outsourcing location” and so on and so forth, but an accidental undersea cable rupture can still cause havoc in the country’s call center industry.

“…the president of India’s Internet Service Providers’ Association has said that the broken links carry “most of India’s premium traffic to the Atlantic region,” implying that some U.K. businesses may experience a disruption of traffic to their call centers in the region. For those that depend on overnight processing of data in India, or the handling of internet queries by contact centers there, even a slowdown in the transmission speed can have potentially serious effects”.

“We are observing high latencies and packet drops on affected internet circuits resulting in slow response times while accessing applications, VPN, email and internet browsing,” said an Infosys BPO spokesperson in an emailed statement to The Economic Times.

While the big Indian outsourcing companies, such as Infosys and Wipro, have said that they are still trying to determine the extent of disruptions to their work, condition of major foreign companies with significant back-office or technology development operations in India, like IBM, too is no different.

Well, this is only one incident, which shook the multibillion dollar worth industry of India. But, there could be many more disasters like this or even worse, so how are the Indian service providers gearing-up to keep their operations running successfully and without any disruptions? How strong is their back-up to facilitate their businesses in such scenarios?

Source - Adyasha Sinha