Just to add to what you have said, most of the workforce in Indian call centers comprises of graduates whereas for doing purely customer service on non-technical issues even an average high schooler in US would do since the skills needed are mainly local communication and cultural empathy. The indian BPO industry is doing the right thing by making better use of its resources. Its far easier to train a graduate to analyze an insurance form (picking an analytical/transactional skill) than to train him/her to sound and act like an american. Not to mention it is more profitable too. The buzzwords in indian outsourcing industry these days are accounting, legal process and analytics where cheaper indian accountants, lawyers and engineers/economics grads can make use of technology and make much more money too.
Your experience is a little dated - now you can just log on to a website like http://irctc.co.in/ [irctc] and book tickets. Its couriered to you in a day. I guess the next step is to allow you to print your own tickets but this is extremely handy too.
For this price we could get 2 full time employees in India ironing clothes for the whole year. So what remains is to develop a technology to teleport the clothes back and forth. Man I am patenting this:-)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/photos/moon_images.htm
Just to add to what you have said, most of the workforce in Indian call centers comprises of graduates whereas for doing purely customer service on non-technical issues even an average high schooler in US would do since the skills needed are mainly local communication and cultural empathy. The indian BPO industry is doing the right thing by making better use of its resources. Its far easier to train a graduate to analyze an insurance form (picking an analytical/transactional skill) than to train him/her to sound and act like an american. Not to mention it is more profitable too. The buzzwords in indian outsourcing industry these days are accounting, legal process and analytics where cheaper indian accountants, lawyers and engineers/economics grads can make use of technology and make much more money too.
Your experience is a little dated - now you can just log on to a website like http://irctc.co.in/ [irctc] and book tickets. Its couriered to you in a day. I guess the next step is to allow you to print your own tickets but this is extremely handy too.
For this price we could get 2 full time employees in India ironing clothes for the whole year. So what remains is to develop a technology to teleport the clothes back and forth. Man I am patenting this :-)
I think thats OK - even when the results are put up on bulletin boards (physical one's) everyone can see all the results.