Outsource Your Insurance to India

Racially speaking, the UK is going through some unstable times at the moment. We’ve seen lots of Big Brother scandals, band wagon jumping, guilty conscience issues and politically correct w*#kers piping up after years of ignorance. Now it is Norwich Union’s turn to walk the racial tight rope.

Such a large insurance company will have pages upon pages of racism policies, churned out by the human resources department as quickly as they can copy and paste government guidelines into a word document and hit send on an email. However, there’s another side to any big company. Wonga. Dosh. The Bottom Line. The Readies. The Queen’s Toilet Paper. Money.

Outsourcing your call centre function to India is not an uncommon technique. Many large companies do the same thing and have been doing so for years now. It appears as though they can’t pay their employees little enough t’up North and government funded work based learning programmes (and the like) can’t make up the difference compared to changing the pound sign on your balance sheet expenses directly into rupees.

Finally, however, common sense and consumer pressure has prevailed as Norwich Union annouced they’re moving their Indian outsourced insurance call centre back to good old blighty. A tough pill to swallow for the accountants. Abbey National and Powergen made the same U-turn recently too. Between them, they brought about 1,500 jobs back to the UK. It seems as though the best call centre staff of Asia experienced cultural differences with UK customers. No big surprise there for anyone who’s actually lived in the real world. But reading between the lines, are they simply saying they couldn’t understand each other on the phone or that being hit head-on by a car coming at you, in your lane doesn’t happen very often in the UK?

I’m a traditionalist so I’m glad to see some faith restored in our homegrown resources but it does mean that I’ll be selling my Punjabi phrase book on eBay and hoping to pick up a scoucers guide to insurance terminology!