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What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans-and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors ofAnswer the Callconducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of \"virtual migration.\" Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans-and for each other. Call center agents \"migrate\" through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents' sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between-between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future. However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent's greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: \"Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?\"

Transnational customer service workers are an emerging touchstone of globalization given their location at the intersecting borders of identity, class, nation, and production. Unlike outsourced manufacturing jobs, call center work requires voice-to-voice conversation with distant customers; part of the product being exchanged in these interactions is a responsive, caring, connected self. InPhone Clones, Kiran Mirchandani explores the experiences of the men and women who work in Indian call centers through one hundred interviews with workers in Bangalore, Delhi, and Pune. As capital crosses national borders, colonial histories and racial hierarchies become inextricably intertwined. As a result, call center workers in India need to imagine themselves in the eyes of their Western clients-to represent themselves both as foreign workers who do not threaten Western jobs and as being \"just like\" their customers in the West. In order to become these imagined ideal workers, they must be believable and authentic in their emulation of this ideal. In conversation with Western clients, Indian customer service agents proclaim their legitimacy, an effort Mirchandani calls \"authenticity work,\" which involves establishing familiarity in light of expectations of difference. In their daily interactions with customers, managers and trainers, Indian call center workers reflect and reenact a complex interplay of colonial histories, gender practices, class relations, and national interests.

The present paper discusses the role of cabs and the presence of other men in the cab in manufacturing respectability for the unmarried women agents of call centers in India. The night shift, an intrinsic part of work, at call centers in India demands mobility and access to public space during nights for its women employees. The paper elaborates how the relation between gender and space is evolving in the backdrop of the presence of someone trusted, through a shift from private patriarchy to public patriarchy for the women agents while accessing the public space. The paper is based on a total of sixty-one qualitative interviews conducted with unmarried women call center employees and parents based in Gurgaon, India.

The study was designed to understand important aspects of the call center agents' job, from the point of view, and the relationship between these aspects and agent effectiveness as perceived by agents' supervisors. Qualitative data gathering involved three methods: critical incidents, behavioral events interviews and focus group interviews. Based on the items thus identified, a questionnaire was administered to agents in two call centers, and the results were analyzed using factor analysis and correlation analysis. Four distinct factors emerged from the analysis: intrinsic motivation, reward/recognition, customer stress and stress managements. IM correlated positively with effectiveness, especially among experienced agents. CS correlated negatively with IM and positively with RR; SM correlated positively with IM.

This chapter examines the emotion work of deference and caring among Indian customer service agents. Deference and caring are central to call center work; emotion work involves the enactment of femininity for both male and female employees. Workers serve and care for Western customers by reproducing hierarchies present in many traditionally feminized service occupations such as nursing and domestic work. This chapter explores gender and racism in relation to the feminization of emotion work and how emotion work enables call center agents to learn to not take the rude behavior of customers personally, thus maintaining self-worth in the face of abusive customers. It shows how aggressive and abusive behavior is normalized in the context of encounters between Westerners and Indians, which provide a forum for a continual process of racialization.

This book explores how the negotiation of authenticity becomes a central part of transnational customer service work as a result of the exchange of labor and capital that occurs in the context of national histories and power inequities. More specifically, it considers how workers housed in cubicled call centers in India enter into a complex interplay of colonial histories, class relations, and national interests, which are embedded within their authenticity work—the work of being oneself and simultaneously like someone faraway imagines one should be. It shows that becoming a phone clone involves emulating, through voice, an ideal transnational call center worker who is both close to and distant from customers in the West. By studying the experiences of Indian customer service agents, this book sheds light on a wide range of service-related activities that cross national borders, from Filipino nannies refashioning themselves to clone faraway employers' visions of ideal caregivers, to health workers in Mexico servicing American medical tourists.