Outsourcing Jobs, Workers to India
A London-based travel agency has taken outsourcing to a new level, shipping both call-center jobs and the workers who perform them to India.
Begun with five young Finns who moved to New Dehli in July 2002, ebookers PLC is sending Europeans to answer phones and e-mails at a call center in India for wages that are roughly one-fourth what similar jobs fetch at home. Now ebookers' Indian subsidiary plans to expand and sell the idea as a service to other businesses.
The company is pitching the jobs as a way to see the world, the information-age equivalent of joining the Peace Corps or the Foreign Legion. So far, it has drawn more than 50 adventure-seeking recruits from Finland, Norway, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Ireland and Germany.
The program is the latest twist on the migration of work to the developing world, a phenomenon reshaping the service sector in the U.S. and prompting hand-wringing about job losses in corporate and political circles. In India, exports of software and services grew 26%, to $9.5 billion, in the year through the end of March, according to the National Association of Software & Service Companies, an Indian technology-trade lobby.
Ebookers' program is also a possible road map for how multinational companies with operations in Continental Europe could move more jobs offshore, where language barriers have been an obstacle. English is widely spoken in India, the Philippines and other outsourcing centers. But the languages of small European countries aren't spoken in those lands, posing a built-in brake to moving work such as call centers abroad.
The online travel agency's Scandinavia manager, Tera Komulainen, a 52-year-old Finn, came up with the idea during an April 2002 visit to New Delhi. On that trip, she was looking for a way to cut costs by shifting customer-service work to ebookers' Indian subsidiary, Tecnovate eSolutions, as her U.K. counterparts had done.
The hitch: Virtually no one in India speaks Finnish -- or Danish or Norwegian or Swedish.
One month later, a flier went up in Helsinki travel-trade schools promising "the experience of your lifetime." The first five Finns -- and other Europeans who signed up later -- have put up with discomforts like diarrhea and frequent power outages, but they seem to be taking the experience in stride.
The call-center workers -- both Indians and Europeans -- make about $6,000 a year to start. The Europeans also get company-paid housing. "I actually didn't even care about the salary that much," says Sanna Nevalainen, 27, from Finland, who stayed for eight months.
Ebookers markets the jobs as a way to see the world. But for these employees, the trek to India -- once associated in the West with discovering one's inner self -- means spending much of their time staring at a computer screen. Would-be flower children needn't apply. "You got some replies from hippie types," says Ms. Komulainen. "We didn't want those."
The work itself is standard customer-service fare, including answering e-mails and phone calls from Europeans back home about travel arrangements and flight times. The Europeans in New Delhi, whose work day is shifted by a few hours to be in sync with their home market, say that apart from flickering lights and non-Nordic colleagues, there are few clues in the office that they are abroad.
On weekends, though, they travel around India or dance to Hindi pop in New Delhi discos. "In Finland, life can sometimes be boring. But not here," says Anne-Maarit Laitinen, 26, the Finnish team leader in New Delhi.
The workers say their lower wages stretch fairly far because the cost of living is so low in India. Lasse Rantala, 25, among the first Finns to sign up, stayed for a year and now works for ebookers in Helsinki. He says he saved some money in India, but more importantly, "It was something else than just to study and stay in cold Finland."
Ebookers, which trades on the London Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market and had more than $450 million in sales last year, won't say exactly how much money it's saving through the program. But the company says it is coming out well ahead, even after paying for perks like round-trip plane tickets for Europeans who stay on for 12 months and transportation to and from the office each day.
The call-center trek will never approach the scale of conventional job outsourcing to India, in which local English speakers field calls from American and British consumers or do technical tasks and research for companies abroad. Technology-outsourcing experts say Europeans with advanced skills are unlikely to agree to the pay, while the brisk turnover of young, low-skilled expat workers offsets part of the savings by imposing added recruiting and training costs. There are also some low-cost locales where European languages are spoken, such as the Francophone island of Mauritius, east of Africa, that may be cheaper options than dispatching Europeans to India.
"I don't think I would dabble in this experiment," says Jaswinder Ghumman, country manager for Convergys Corp. of Cincinnati, which has 5,700 call-center employees in New Delhi and Bangalore.
But ebookers appears to have hit on a viable niche. Thirty workers from different European countries are in India under the program now. Groups from Spain and the Netherlands will leave for New Delhi within the next month. Ebookers will enter the Danish travel market this fall, and its customer-service reps -- all Danes -- will be in India.
欧洲军团进驻印度，业务外包更上层楼
总部位于伦敦的网络旅行社ebookers PLC将业务外包推进到了一个新的层次：该公司将客户服务中心的所有职位连同相应员工统统外派到了印度。
ebookers PLC先是在2002年7月将5名芬兰籍雇员派到新德里。随后，该公司又陆续将其欧洲雇员派到印度的客户服务中心，负责接听电话和回复电子邮件，而他们的工资却只相当于本国同类工作收入的四分之一。现在，ebookers的印度分公司计划扩展这种经营理念，并为其他有意外包业务的公司提供服务。
ebookers对这类外派工作的描述颇具诱惑力：它为你开启了一扇了解世界的窗口，选择这份工作就如同加入了信息时代的美国和平队(Peace Corps)或法国外籍兵团(Foreign Legion)。到目前为止，该公司已招募到50多名寻求异域冒险的志愿者，他们来自芬兰、挪威、瑞典、法国、瑞士、爱尔兰和德国等不同的欧洲国家。
随著企业将业务转移至发展中国家，美国的服务行业经历了一场重组，由此引发的失业问题让商界和政界人士茫然不知所措。不过，ebookers的这个项目赋予外包新的意义。据印度科技行业游说组织－－全国软件与服务企业联合会(National Association of Software & Service Companies)统计，截至3月底的一年内，印度的软件及服务出口较上年增长了26%，达到95亿美元。
对那些在欧洲大陆经营业务的跨国企业来说，ebookers的项目提供了一条跨越语言障碍，将更多工作岗位转移至海外的可行性路线。在印度、菲律宾等外包业务比较集中的地区，英语相当普及。但这些地方很少有人会说一些欧洲小国的语言，使企业难以将类似客户服务中心这样的工作外包至海外。
连人带职位一同外包的主意是ebookers现年52岁的斯堪的纳维亚区经理科穆莱宁(Tera Komulainen)想出来的。在2002年4月前往新德里的途中，她不断思索著，试图找出一个办法，能像英国同行那样，将客户服务工作转移到印度的分公司Tecnovate eSolutions，以节省公司的经营成本。
最大的障碍是：印度几乎没有人会说芬兰语，也很少有人懂丹麦语、挪威语和瑞典语。
一个月后，ebookers开始在赫尔辛基的旅游业院校分发招聘广告，承诺这份工作能够"带给人享用一生的非凡经历"。最先抵达印度的5个芬兰人及后来陆续加入的一些欧洲雇员都克服了痢疾和停电等种种不适，并且很快适应了新生活。
客户服务中心的员工，不管是印度人还是欧洲人，起薪都是每年大约6000美元。欧洲雇员可以获得公司提供的住宿。来自芬兰的尼瓦莱纳(Sanna Nevalainen)说，"实际上我并不太在意薪水的多少。"27岁的她在这里已经待了8个月。
ebookers将这份工作描述成一个看世界的良机。西方人曾经将艰难跋涉到印度与发掘内在自我联系在一起。不过对ebookers的这些员工来说，印度之旅意味著长时间盯著电脑屏幕工作。嬉皮少年肯定不适合。科穆莱宁说，"有些人只是抱著游戏的态度来应聘。我们当然不会要这样的人。"
工作本身是典型的客户服务，包括回复电子邮件及欧洲客户打来的电话，内容主要是旅行安排及航班信息。为了协调与本土市场的工作时间，这些新德里的欧洲员工的工作时间与当地正常工作时间有几个小时的偏差。他们说，除了闪烁不定的灯光和一些非北欧的同事的面孔，他们很难感受到自己身处异国他乡。
但一到周末，他们就会四处周游，或去新德里的迪斯科舞厅随著印度流行乐翩翩起舞。今年26岁的芬兰姑娘莱廷南(Anne-Maarit Laitinen)说，"在芬兰的生活有时很枯燥，但这里就不会。"她在新德里的客户服务中心担任组长职务。
这些外派印度的欧洲员工说，虽然印度的工资相对于本土要低，但由于印度的消费水平很低，所以这些工资已足够花销。25岁的兰塔拉(Lasse Rantala)是第一批来印度的芬兰人之一，他在印度工作了一年，目前在ebookers的赫尔辛基分部工作。他说，他在印度时还攒了些钱，但最重要的是，"此番经历比单纯在寒冷的芬兰读书和生活更有意义"。
ebookers不愿透露这个项目为其节省了多少成本。该公司在伦敦股票交易所及那斯达克市场上市，去年的收入超过4.5亿美元。但ebookers表示，这个项目的效果不错，扣除为在印度服务一年的欧洲雇员支付的往返机票及在当地的交通费用，公司还是节省了很多成本。
当然，将客户服务中心外包的规模永远不会达到传统外包业务的规模。传统的外包模式是雇佣会说英语的当地人回答美国和英国客户的问题，或为海外公司提供技术或研究服务。
技术外包专家说，对于这样的工资水平，一些具备先进工作技能的欧洲人是不大可能接受的；而那些工作技能较低的年轻人总爱频繁跳槽，这就会增加公司的招聘和培训成本，也会抵消一部分因外包而节省的成本。
而且，还有其他一些成本更低、但又会说欧洲语言的劳动力可供选择。如非洲东部的毛里求斯人就会说法语，雇佣他们比派欧洲人去印度更便宜。
辛辛那提的Convergys Corp.驻印度经理古曼(Jaswinder Ghumman)说，"我想我不会做这样的实验。"Convergys在新德里和班加洛有5,700个客户服务中心雇员。
但ebookers看上去确实找到了可行之道。目前已有30名来自欧洲不同国家的雇员在新德里工作。从西班牙与荷兰招来的雇员下个月就会启程前往新德里。ebookers今年秋天将进入丹麦旅游市场，届时负责该地区的客户服务代表－－清一色的丹麦人－－想来已进驻印度。
