The facts about offshoring are murky, but some researchers are trying to demystify it. Do you know just many call center agent, supervisor, and other knowledge-worker positions are leaving the US (and the UK) for low cost "offshore" locales like India, the Philippines, South Africa and Latin America? Your guess is as good as anyone else's. Research firms have been trying to get a handle on this trend. But the effort is like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant. For example, Datamonitor released January 23 a new paper, Global Offshore Call Center Outsourcing: Who will be the next India, that predicts only 5% or 241,100 of an estimated 4.78 million call center workstations will be located offshore by 2007.

The paper reviews 22 countries. But a telling article published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Jan.19 reveals that no one for sure knows what's going on. The story cited the (in)famous Forrester Research report that predicted 3.3 million US white collar jobs will move offshore by 2015. But it also pointed to a McKinsey study that suggested that the US is gaining more than losing from offshoring. Forrester later published study saying that only 5% of Fortune 1000 firms have taken full advantage of offshoring. There is no reliable data, for example, from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The paper quotes Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research as saying that in many sectors, there is not sufficient data to say definitively what is going on. Offshoring is a sensitive topic in Washington State: home to Microsoft, which has begun to offshore some of its customer support work, and to a constellation of other high-tech firms and call center outsourcers. Not surprisingly, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) asked the General Accounting Office to conduct a study, which the Post-Intelligencer story reports should be out in the spring. It doesn't help on the call center side that there are no generally accepted definitions of "call center" or call center occupations. Or for that matter what is being offshored. Does having five support reps in a corner of a Bangalore office to support a new product devised there that would have been developed in Boston count as offshoring? Or offshoring call center workstations? BLS officials told me that it is up to the call center "industry" to come up with the definitions of these occupations for the government to measure with. This is Logic 101: before you can debate a topic, you must agree on the definitions of your terms.

But while the numbers are not clear from the myriad of reports there are some emerging trends. Firms still prefer to outsource rather than locate in-house call centers to developing countries like India most obviously for political/media relations reasons. "The focus has shifted towards selling outsourcing rather than selling 'offshore'," comments Ryan Powell, call center technology analyst with Datamonitor and author of that report. "Once firms have outsourced to a third party, it becomes much more acceptable to move that work offshore" Powell continues. "The numbers and analysis provided help to demystify the threat that offshore poses to domestic jobs." Site selectors add that locating and opening up a call center in a developing country like India is not for faint hearts, shallow pockets and impatient fingers. You really need to know the lay of the land, understand the culture and bureaucracy intimately and have considerable patience. You will pay for items you would never dream of in the US: like minibuses that pick up your agents and take them home. Another trend is serving the emerging Spanish-speaking market, which puts Asian and African locations and bureaus out of the picture unless they partner with Latin American bureaus.

Datamonitor predicts Mexico will experience massive growth in the number of call center agent positions. Last but not least it isn't accent that matters with offshore agents (go to any major American and Canadian city and you'll hear a UN full of accented English) but cultural affinity. An Indian immigrant living in Boston and working out on the famed (if faded) Route 128 high-tech belt will have a far better understanding of Americans than his cousin working in that earlier-described Bangalore office corner. "As more countries offer offshore outsourcing, anecdotal evidence of bad call center experiences will continue to appear in the media but the real issue concerns the agent's ability to relate to the consumer on a cultural level," says Datamonitor's Powell.