Font Size 
BPO staff need ethical training: Poll
Published on Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 17:44, Updated at Fri, Oct 06, 2006 in 
Tags: 
Other stories in the section:
BPOs in Aussie bank's bad books
Australian Finance Sector Union (FSU) has urged its St George Bank shareholders to reject sending jobs to India.
ICS also advocates for whistle-blowing policies and training on ethics to the employees in the call centre industry. It says absence of anonymous emails and an ethics hotline are a big handicap and this discourages internal policing and development of certain ethical standards within an organisation.
For instance, ICS cites an instance where a BPO employee had smelt foul-play by one of his colleagues but could not do anything about it. "I have observed a colleague constantly talking on phone in a South Indian Language in a suspicious manner, but I was unable to understand the language and hence did not report it. My bosses would have asked me for explanations,” the ICS study quotes the employee as saying.
In another instance, another BPO employee knew about his colleague's fraudulent designs, but never spoke up. "I have seen a person, who was leaving the job, noting down a list of some credit card numbers and their expiry dates. I knew it was wrong but why create problems for the person who was quitting," he told the ICS surveyors.
As for ethical training, ICS says this is one area the BPO industry should attach some importance to. "Call centres concentrate on training individuals in English language, Voice Modulation and soft-skills. They do not consider training on dealing with complaints on fraudincident important enough - despite the fact that most of the employees are barely out of their teens and ill-equipped to cope with such complaints," the Forensic Accounting Services agency observes.
INCIDENTS OF FRAUD |
In April 2005, five employees of MsourcE in Pune were arrested for allegedly pulling off a fraud worth nearly Rs 2.5 crore from Citibank accounts of four New York-based account holders. |
| In June 2005, the British tabloid Sun conducted a sting operation by purchasing the bank account details of 1,000 Britons for about $5.50 each from Karan Bahree, an employee of Gurgaon-based BPO company Infinity E-Search. |
| In June 2006, Nadeem Kashmiri, an employee at HSBC's call center in Bangalore, sold the customer credit card information to a group of scamsters who used the information to siphon off nearly Rs 1.8 crore from bank accounts of UK-based customers. |
| Three months later, the Channel 4 data theft scandal has hit the headlines, and coincidentally, it is also UK-based. |
More Headlines from Business
| Related links: | |
Total Comments: 0
Read Comment | Post Comment
Be the first to comment.