Outsourcing international relations

I got a phone call from India the other day.  This is nothing new.  Even though I don't know anyone in India, I get many calls from the call centers there.

Like anyone with a telephone who has lived in the same place for more than a few months, we regularly get sales calls.  Everyone who has been subject to the litany of calls can attest to the poor timing; the calls inevitably happen just as you are getting home, just as you are cooking dinner, or just as you are sitting down to eat.  They call during that precious period between when you arrive home and that ill-defined time when it's considered too late to call, which for a telephone solicitor is, thankfully, earlier than it would be for a friend. 

What you may not know is that these calls also happen during your normal working hours.  I discovered this when I stopped work to take care of my child.  Now I can get an unsolicited sales call when I am feeding my son, changing his diaper, or putting him down for his nap.  The timing of the call is annoying because it happens when you are at home at all.  It is an invasion of our personal time (and space - I don't pay $30/month to have a phone line with the intent of making it easier for the telemarketers - wouldn't it be great if we could treat them like the trespassers that they are).

Okay, so you know how I feel about telephone solicitors, and my guess is that you share some of these feelings.  I'm probably not the only one who provides an abrupt response when I receive these calls.  My partner often engages in little games with the callers before telling them he's not interested.  I'm sure some people give the telephone solicitors an earful before they hang up.  I certainly have in the past.  My standard reply when I get a sales call now is "Not interested. Please remove me from your list.  Thank you."  Then I hang up the phone before they have the chance to try to convince me otherwise.  A few people are authentically sorry for bothering me and don't even try. Most callers I can hear starting their plea as the phone makes it's way
to the hook.

Like many things these days, the work of telephone solicitors is being outsourced overseas.  I rarely receive sales calls from rural Australia, even more rarely receive them from one of the major cities.  Virtually all of our sales calls come from India.  This may make economic sense to the companies using the call centers to sell their wares.  Labor is certainly cheaper in India than Australia.  It probably costs less to call from India to Melbourne than from Adelaide to Melbourne (if my international phone card is anything to go by).  And Indians speak English.  In theory, it's perfect.

Unfortunately for the poor Indians, and for the companies employing their services, they don't actually speak the same language.  Even though the grammar and much of the vocabulary is the same, the pronunciation is often so different that it is notably more difficult for a person from the US or Australia to understand someone from India than someone from their own country.  Furthermore, it is immediately obvious that the caller is not a native Australian, which increases my irritation with the company using the call center; not only are they paying someone to invade my time and space with annoying sales calls for things I don't want, but they won't even pay Australians to do it (probably because it's such a despicable job that Australians demand a lot of money to do it).  Unfortunately for the person on the other end of the phone line, they bear the brunt of this irritation.

Many of the people working in the Indian call centers probably do not have phones in their homes (according to the Economist, there are 4.4 land lines per 100 people in India - compare that with 54.1 and 60.8 land lines per 100 people for Australia and the US), and therefore do not understand how numerous and annoying sales calls are in countries like Australia.  They must think Australians (and this American living in Australia) are terribly rude.  But now, because of this peculiarity of international markets, there is probably more contact between Australians and Indians over sales calls than over cricket.

And that leads me to wonder what effect this new trend towards international call centers is having on international relations.