Pru plays down offshore customer backlash

Prudential has reaffirmed its commitment to opening an offshore Indian call centre, saying it is prepared to "live with" a minor backlash from some customers with extreme views.

The financial services outfit runs two main call centre operations with 400 agents in Scotland and 400 agents in India supporting calls from policyholders and IFAs.

Prudential also runs an automated customer survey at the end of calls to monitor customer service satisfaction and this has highlighted a higher level of customer dissatisfaction - around three per cent - with the Indian call centre than the Scottish one.

But speaking at an offshoring debate at the Call Centre Executive Forum last week Jackie Lindsay, head of voice at Prudential played down fears of any significant customer backlash and said some of it was down to a minority of customers who had expressed "racist" comments in the survey.

"At this point in time we are living with that [level of dissatisfaction]," she said.

Also speaking at the event were Nationwide Building Society, which has taken a very public anti-offshoring stance, and Kwik-Fit Financial Services, which brought an underperforming Indian call centre back to the UK.

John Lye, senior manager, group call handling at Nationwide, said: "We don't believe offshoring fits with our corporate strategy. We have no intention of moving our call centres offshore."

Kwik-Fit said it believed the main reason for its offshore failure was choosing to migrate a service focused heavily on outbound cold-calls to customers.

Alan Brown, operations director at Kwik-Fit Financial Services, said as a result of choosing the wrong kind of process to offshore the performance of the Indian operation never even matched that of the UK call centre.

Despite the enthusiasm and education of Indian staff, Brown said there were huge variations in quality standards, inexperienced local management, cultural differences and a disproportionate amount of management time spent on the Indian centre.

"It didn't fulfil our cost savings. The 40 to 50 per cent never materialised. I would say it is nearer 20 per cent," he said.

Mike Havard, MD at contact centre consultancy CM Insight, said customer reaction is still going to be a key factor in the success or failure of offshoring.

"The customer is going to be the final arbiter on this," he said.