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Google opens sales centre in city
Hyderabad, Oct. 12:
Google, Inc, the world's largest Internet search engine company, launched its online sales and operations centre in Hyderabad on Tuesday. The centre will also focus on human resources functions, Google's co-founders and presidents, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, told reporters here.
They said Google will be expanding the Hyderabad centre, which will serve as a support centre for the company's worldwide advertising clients.
However, both Brin and Page declined to discuss either Google's investment in the Hyderabad centre or its research and development centre in Bangalore. The two men, who co-founded Google in 1998, will be in Bangalore on Wednesday for the inauguration of the R&D centre there.
"Google's AdWords adver tisers and AdSense publishers throughout the world will receive seamless online sales service and support in their local time from the team in Hyderabad," a Google release said. "Engineers hired into the Google Hyderabad engineering centre will mirror Google's other engineering offices, with the same scope of work, hiring standards and Google culture. They will be part of a worldwide effort to create the best search experience for Google users and can expect to tackle some of the most interesting challenges in computing today," it added.
Asked whether Google, which listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market in August with a $2.7 billion initial public offering, would be offering stock options to its employees in India, Brin said the company was planning compensation packages which would be similar to stock options. Brin indicated that Google planned to introduce search services in more Indian languages. The search engine currently offers services in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu and Tamil. He said the Bangalore centre would be involved in product development.
Antoine Colaco, operations manager for the India Online Sales, Google had chosen Hyderabad because of the technology-literate Englishspeaking population, a competitive economic environment and good infrastructure.
Its all about Money ..Honey!
I could tell you some great indigenous Indian products which are world beaters but that is not the issue. To me the issues revolve around the quality of service, expectation and resolution.
Would it be wrong to say that these "outsourced" companies have now absolved themselves of their much vaunted customer service to these call centres and the buck stops there with no one able to resolve anything?
It is a problem which will not go away and which must be addressed by all considering such a move.
Must go...urgent phone call!
Lakshmi Mittal
The quality of recruitment is not at all worth, the undergraduates are hired at Dirt cheap and given one month training to answer the calls of Customer of American insurance company. They even keep their names as Tom, Dick and Harry! (its true)
They will obviously fall falt because of lack of expertise.
but anyway, this is not the case everywhere! Google is not going to go for such recruitment... we all pray.
Hyderabad is a city that has constructed large industrial parks with lush fountains and gardens in a state that is going through a drought [sunnetwork.org]. Meanwhile, farmers have less access to water, while water guarantees are made to the large coroporations.
Hundreds of farmers are committing suicide because they can no longer pay their debts. The government gives tax benefits to the big corporations that set up shop. Farms are failing.
Is Google perpetuating the tragedy by moving there?
Well, I agree nothing is more important than food and so are the people who grow them, the champion of IT growth in Hyderabad, (Cyberabad as he affectionately called it :)) Mr. Naidu, had an interesting point. Villages do not grow unless the cities grow, for cities get the major income for the state. Though he succeeded in turning Hyd. a major IT hub, how far he succeeded in channelling the money earned from them for the welfare of the farmers is debatable.
For, now I would have it as, farmers have all the reasons to smile with entry of biggies to Hyd, but there has to be a political will to channel the money earned by the state for the betterment of the poor and farmers.
Mc
Last time adwords support took 6 long days to answer my simple support request and in that "prompt" reply they asked me to wait for a few more days for the issue to be resolved. I waited for another 10 days for the issue to be resolved. Next time it happens to you then you will have someone to blame for such high quality service. Damn Indians can't offer support any faster - Isn't that easier to say?
Also, I am glad that current decline in quality of google's SERPs, that started with update Florida of last year, happened much before they started operations in India. Otherwise we would have seen people here putting the blame for that too on the doors of their Indian operations. Damn Indians can't get that algo right in the first attempt... ;)
1. The financial and economical effects both to ourselves and whether these jobs are having a detrimental effect to Indians at the expense of their fellow countrymen.
2. The very poor training and apparent "lack of service" from these centres.
I can speak from a very experienced situation since I have worked with Indian factories and people for more than 30 years and I can tell you that even now I am in contact with our extremely talented management and staff every day whether by e-mail, fax, phone or SMS.
At the present time it is simply not practical to resolve many problems using a call centre staffed by people given stock responses to any query.
It just does not work. People need to be trained and understand their respective industries thoroughly otherwise we shall read more and more complaints about this apparent "lack of service".
In actual fact we are opening offices in specific countries precisely to deal with any "problems" which may arise, more quickly and efficiently, which means that jobs are now coming in "our" direction.
It is not the Indians, I repeat again " it is the application of this technology which is badly executed."
Believe this or not I now have to drive three hours to resolve a "possible problem" with a delivery from India.
How could that be sorted by a call centre?
At the end of the day we can have as many call centres as we like, however if there is no demand for that consumer/industrial product to be purchased, they will all be left redundant!
The very poor training and apparent "lack of service" from these centres.
Isn't that like jumping the gun to assume that google's Indian operations will be manned by poorly trained people who will specialize in providing nothing but poor support?
That is not to train the support staff in full, nor to give them the technical and administrative power that they require. This means they frequently have to pass on requests and queries to their supervisors (often right back in the country you are calling from) because they either don't have the training or the system access to help you.
And regarding VOIP, I certainly did mean Voice over Internet Protocol, a very popular way to vastly reduce the cost of forwarding phonecalls to distant locations, and used by many such support centres. The reference to poor quality was only with regard to my personal experience of using such services and having great difficulty understanding (due mostly to the line quality, not the accent) the person at the other end.
There is much to say for local knowledge as well - I have personally been assured by outsourced support staff that broadband ADSL would be enabled on my Mobile phone (quoted by number), as the staff member was not able to distinguish a mobile number from a land line number.
I do apologise if I have offended anyone Indian, my criticism was only of the companies, not the staff.
I was merely making a note about how a seemingly ideological startup can go from launch to completely engulfed in the corporate mentality (i.e. profit is everything) in such a short time.
I've never had a problem with our adwords account (although we're hardly a power-spender, we spend less than $7k a month), so have never had need to contact support, so I couldn't comment about it's quality before being outsourced, much less after.
It's just unfortunate to me that all the hundreds if not thousands of jobs at google couldn't have been kept at home. Despite being "Global", it IS still an American company.
Last time adwords support took 6 long days to answer my simple support request...
I'm in the United States. All I currently have to do is pick up the phone and call the Kool Kids at Google to have whatever I need taken care of resolved, usually in less than five minutes.
If you're waiting 6 days for a response it may be because you may not know how to ask or else you're outside the US.
In this particular case, moving the support center to India cannot possibly be better for me than having an American answering the phone. The cultural and social differences are tremendous, which will have a definite impact on how we communicate with each other. Concepts that we take for granted in the US are not commonly known or understood in India or other countries.
I read an article in The New Yorker about one of the top outsourcing centers in Hyderabad. The article mentioned that something as simple as the greeting, "What's up?" can cause the person in India to look up at the ceiling wondering what you are on about.
So to my view, there are communication issues tied to culture and society that may rise up and make it a pain in the rear to deal with their customer support.
This is not a knock against India. Just an acknowledgement that there are cultural and societal differences between most countries. I Would say much the same if the center was outsourced to Scotland or Ireland.
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:46 pm (utc) on Oct. 15, 2004]
I find it quite comical that anyone could speculate this is bad for India. Every person working in the new economy there on above average salaries will be able to support his whole family.
Once the money starts flowing there will be money to build infrastructure to the benefit of all.
Or perhaps things should stay as they are?
I read an article in The New Yorker about one of the top outsourcing centers in Hyderabad. The article mentioned that something as simple as the greeting, "What's up?" can cause the person in India to look up at the ceiling wondering what you are on about.
Yes, there are cultural differences but people over here (in India) are not as stupid, or else they won't be competing so successfully that vast majority of those in American media feel threatened by it.
Also people tend to forget about the cultural differences when American MNCs like Coke or Pepsi are selling their sugared water across the globe.
I remember late 1980s when Japanese companies like Toyota and Honda were giving loss making American auto makers a run for their money and newspapers were full of speculation that a Japanese auto maker will launch a hostile takeover bid for GM because its market cap was down to around only $6 billion. At that time too American newspapers were busy writing uninformed pieces of opinions like what they are writing today about India. American writers were out in force predicting the death of Japanese auto makers because they were making low quality cars. Despite all that Toyota and Honda are still very profitable and their market share is increasing even today.
Similarly I see people complaining in this very thread about "VOIP" and quality issues. To all those questioning the wisdom of such a business move, I'd like to ask - Are you smarter than the founders and/or CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations or Fortune-500 companies such as google, IBM, HP, EDS, Oracle, Microsoft, Samsung, Nokia etc.? Is there something that thay they don't have brains to understand but writer of article in New Yorker does?
This is my last post in this thread. I saw the news story mentioned in this thread in local media over here in India 1 or 2 days before this thread was started but I didn't mention that on webmasterworld because I have seen 2-3 threads here before this one taking the same direction like this thread has taken.
East europe have remarkable programmers (even i sometime contract programming to a bulgarian team) with relatively low cost but they simply cannot scale as india ...In india i can go to any of the top 10 city and hire say a thousand J2EE programmers the next week but its simply not possible in europe or for that matter anywhere in the world.
You know even with this IT boom there are hundreds of thousands of unempoyed computer engineering graduates/programmers in india . There are many stories where thousands of people appear for 'walk in interviews' for a few openings and the companies have to call police to control the mayhem!
Also i know some indian companies set up operations in china to tap the big japanese and korean IT/BPO market . Its easy to train a chinese guy to speak japanese than a indian
Yeah but are any of them any good? A friend of mine is vice predident of a bank in central Europe. They have a lot of trouble with Indians not being able to cope and messing things up. I think there are a lot of people winging it out there riding on the buzz of Indian programmers.
But the generalization that all indians are bad is naive - IMHO Its all numbers game .If i can hire 1000 programmers at cost of 100 programmers in USA , even if 10% of them are no good i dont care :)
BUT,
SOME NON INDIANS are literally CRYING..INDIANS HAS THE IMMENSE POTENTIAL To LIVE ANY where in the world ..Peacefully.. With out disturbing the local cultures. INDIANS are very much aware of what they are doing..
OUR POLICY IS LIVE AND LET LIVE.
DON'T CRY.. You will loose your consciousness..
SHARMA,
HYDERABAD
WE WILL WORK HARD TO COMPETE WITH YOU.. TRY to IMPROVE on the above weakness areas which POINTED BY YOU...
Think outside the box - Change or die. Lower paid offshore staff are an opportunity for an edge.
It's interesting to watch the power shift from governments to individuals. Soon it won't matter where you live - your skills and intelligence will determine your pay - not geography.
And thank God for that!
Today it's Indians, tomorrow it will be Russians.Think outside the box - Change or die. Lower paid offshore staff are an opportunity for an edge.
It's interesting to watch the power shift from governments to individuals. Soon it won't matter where you live - your skills and intelligence will determine your pay - not geography.
And thank God for that!
Unfortunately many dont agree that it is exactly the skill and intelligence alone that is the factor. That can be reasonably found anywhere. It is the cost that is driving the decision. And only the cost.
Here is my view from a couple of months back. Its changed a bit now.
First of all the outsourcing phenomenon cannot be stopped what with major companies like HP (and others like Microsoft are also sticking to their guns) openly proclaiming that there is no job that is a God given right of Americans. Even if a Bill is passed and a law is enacted (Which is highly improbable) to stop complete outsourcing, there will be ways or loopholes big enough for a 3 ton whale to dance through.
Is one side's gain the lose of others. Thinking about answering this really sends the shivers down my gutless spine. So here is what i think.
Yup it is not a Win-Win situation at the outset. Definitely US seems to be jeopardized by all this job loss. There is no denying that. But the thing to look at is would the companies be able to sustain themselves for long, paying American rates to their Employees (and therefore selling costlier products) while having to compete with companies outside selling the same stuff for much lesser cost. And would those same Employees buy the costlier product (which is, by the way, because of them) rather than opt for the lesser priced competitors product for personal use? Well this does seem like a endless regression. But i am of the view that Americans will have to be given time to adapt themselves for the changing scenario in the Global Economy. AS THIS IS A NEW WAVE WHICH HAS STARTED CONSOLIDATING THE WHOLE WORLD AS A SINGLE MARKET AND RESOURCE.
One thing we don't have to be scared about, is the Global monopoly of a few companies holding the world to ransom. Because in the future companies will have to depend upon other companies which will in turn depend upon other companies. The whole new wave is not consolidating everything into one big inefficient WHOLE, but rather to break up the big WHOLES into efficient, lean and mean self sustaining parts on their own. Where, before everything related to a Company X was handled by it alone, now we find chunks cut off and handed over to other companies who are better at doing it at a cheaper rate. So a company X is not going to be a presence world over by having the same departments doing the same work in each and every country where it is located. But rather X would have Research in Country A, Production in Country B, Accounts in Country C and so on. And in which country which department is located totally depends upon QUALITY and QUANTITY of workers available with the requisite skills in that particular country.
Such specialization really does make one think, what if a person is really good at something which Companies (rather departments) in his/her country cannot use. Well in that case he shall be shifted to where he can use his skills fully. But then there must be a simple or same rules and regulations in both the countries for him to shift, move, work and stay etc etc. In 30-40 years we are going to have countries taking on the role of states by merging into Unions so as to facilitate economic growth. If it seems farfetched take a look around. You find Jobs flying faster than a bullet, people planning to and settling in other countries where they can do what they have SPECIALIZED in , countries forming economic alliances (Days of military and political alliances are at their dusk). But there is a lot of work to be done before everyone can get a fair share of the future pie. Till then the people can cry themselves Hoarse but i really don't think that anyone is going to listen. Yeah sure eyewashes will be given (like the present ban), but always with a future motive or with enough loopholes.
The problem is not just that foreign personnel may not have good grasp of the language and/or the vernacular. They have a real problem understanding regional British accents. The other problem is that people more often than not are calling about some sort of problem that have. There is nothing more frustrating than when you have a problem and the person taking the call cannot even understand what this is.
I am from Scotland and I make no apologies for the fact that I have a broad Scottish accent. I have no problem in being understood by people in the UK, they know Scottish accents. When dealing with Americans I may have to consciously moderate my accent but I can still make myself understood. When I have to go through call centres in India - forget it! Now my Jockney accent is no more difficult to understand than that of a broad Cockney, Geordie, Brummie or Scouser and I am sure that they all experience the same problems.
What we are taking about here is a large proportion of the UK population. Americans will find the same thing if they come from places like Noo Joizay or Nawlins. What this amounts to is a basic disregard for customer care in favour of cutting costs. This is not acceptable and quite clearly, as Jim Royle would say in his regional accent, they don't give a shiny **** for customer service anymore.
Google India Job Opportunities :) Anyone wanna try ;)
I don't see anywhere the VoIP responsibilty mentioned for any of the positions, that a lot of you are feeling jittery about.
*Kidding*
Getting busy to look for my kith or kin, who I can pursue to join Google tech team.
*Kidding*
Due to the high salary offered Rs 10,000 ($ 200) where as the programmer is offered Rs 8000
Thats not the right thing to say. Like you have dollar shops in the US that compromises quality for low price, even here you have TDH programmers and freshers paid that sorta salary, but a good one will cost much higher than that.
