<<< back Bank Announces Closure Of Mumbai Call Centre [02 Mar 2007] Lloyds TSB has admitted to the costly failure of its strategy of offshoring Call Centre jobs to India, by announcing it is to close its Call Centre in Mumbai by the end of March, returning work to the United Kingdom. The Mumbai operation was opened in 2004, when the Bank closed its Newcastle Call Centre with the loss of 968 jobs. At the time there was a massive campaign in the North East opposing the closure. In an attempt to save face over its policy reversal, the Bank is seeking to argue that the closure is the result of the success of its new Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) technology, where customers are able to resolve some queries without having to speak direct to a member of staff. Though a convenient excuse, the facts are that: * Senior Management has acknowledged it will have to recruit hundreds more call centre staff in the UK to replace those in Mumbai. However, it has been unable to confirm whether this will involve more or less than 500 additional UK call centre roles. * The Bank would have known at the time it opened the Mumbai Call Centre that it was introducing new technology, though at that time the India Call Centre was to play a pivotal role in cutting costs. It is only recently that the Bank has conveniently suggested its role has been for the overspill of calls from its UK call centres. * There is no hiding the scale of customer dissatisfaction with the India Call Centre. Over 400,000 Lloyds TSB customers have signed a petition saying they are opposed to having their financial arrangements handled abroad; a survey of branch staff found that the majority had to deal daily with complaints about the India operation; and the Bank acknowledged it had lost its status as having the largest number of customer accounts after it started to transfer work to India. * Savings arising from transferring call centre work to India have been cancelled out because increased numbers of customers have started visiting their branches and tying up staff, in order to ensure they could deal with someone they could by understood by and understand. This is both a major climbdown by the Bank and a massive success for LTU. The Union has been alone in vigorously campaigning against the transfer of jobs to India. LTU's campaign will now switch to those back office and processing roles that the Bank still intends to transfer to India. <<< back

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