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. With The other side of your angry rants at overseas service reps
A little while ago I highlighted a Wall Street Journal piece that looked at the experience of call-center workers in India — how they’re trained, how they’re perceived locally, and so on. A piece on Marketplace yesterday looked at another side of the equation — and how it’s entering Indian pop culture:
The way the Indian call center worker has been the source of ridicule in the U.S., the angry American caller has become legend in India.
Call centers employ around 600,000 people here. Because the industry has propelled India into the global marketplace, the phenomenon has an outsize impact on middle-class culture. It’s spawned a couple TV shows and a best-selling novel called “One Night at the Call Center,” in which demanding customers make the workers’ lives miserable. It’ll be released as a Bollywood film later this year.
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Kim Fellner's book 
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Reader Comments
Call center jobs are hard– overseas or not, there is a certain percentage of of incompetent and/or angry customers and incompetent and/or lazy customer-service reps. Put together that’s a volatile mixture. I’ve certainly heard my share of ‘idiot user’ stories from tech-support workers, and ‘idiot tech support rep’ stories from customers. So, it’s a great concept for a novel or a movie.
But that doesn’t make “One Night at the Call Center” any good. I got a review copy and it was absolutely dreadful: Mitch Albom meets The Office. You didn’t mention that it’s not merely US customers calling in– god gets on the line to force the CSRs to improve their lives and live right.
I’m extremely disappinted to hear that “One Night …” is no good. But I like the idea of god hassling service reps.