Powergen is to shut its Indian call centres and move jobs back to the UK to improve customer services.

The energy company, part of E.ON, intends to withdraw all inbound call handling from India so calls are answered by Powergen’s own UK advisers.

Industry experts believe pressure to retain customers has promoted the decision, that will create around 1,000 new UK jobs throughout 2006.

Nick Horler, managing director of Powergen, said: ‘Offshore call centres may have their place for certain industries. However, we believe that we can best achieve industry-leading customer service by operating solely in the UK.’

He said that although the cost of overseas outsourcing can be low, ‘we’re simply not prepared to achieve savings at the risk or expense of customer satisfaction.’

Martyn Hart, chairman of the National Outsourcing Association, said that following deregulation of the energy industry, suppliers have had to operate in a highly competitive retail market with little top line growth so ‘customer retention has become the key success factor.’

He says companies need to align their offshoring strategy to suite the priorities of their target customers. ‘Offshoring is not for every company,’ he said.

Hart says that factors possibly undermining offshore call centres include high attrition levels which have been reduced in the UK as companies focused on staff training and providing staff with the right information to answer queries and complaints.

Other potential problems include language barriers and cultural sympathy making it difficult for an offshore agent to be really in tune with the cultural issues of another country.

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Further reading:
Indian IT outsourcing reaches £30bn
IT services revenue grew 6 per cent in 2005