London, May 7:

A new industry survey reveals a high level of customer dissatisfaction with the quality of service provided by call centres in India, prompting calls by unions to return offshored jobs back to Britain.

Reports here also mention complaints about the quality of medical transcription work offshored to India, resulting in delays in vital communication with implications on the treatment received by patients in Britain. During the last year, several banks and financial service and utility companies have ‘repatriated’ their call centre services to the UK from India. These include Abbey, NatWest, Lloy-ds TSB, Aviva and Powergen. Unions and some experts claim that cultural misunderstandings and concerns over the quality of service from offshore call centres is forcing companies to rethink their strategies.

The survey by analysts Mintel found that 82 per cent of people questioned indicated they would rather not speak to someone in an overseas call centre when discussing their financial affairs. Pete O’Grady, the assistant secretary for Lloyds TSB Union, said the results echoed an existing trend. “Many companies are now making a big play of the fact that their call centres are based here — the Royal Bank of Scotland has, and they seemed to have benefited from this — so as ever, where the market leads, others follow.”

“Lloyds TSB brought their call centres back because they claimed that technology here gave them greater capacity, but our view was that they were dealing with an increasing number of problems caused specifically by being offshore.”

More than four out of five of adults questioned were worried about the increased potential for account misunderstandings, while security fears are also a genuine area of concern for three-quarters of consum-ers, even though there is actually no evidence that security problems at offshore call centres are any worse than in UK counterparts.

Philip Taylor, professor of human resources at Strathclyde University and an expert on international and domestic call centre industry, said companies no lon-ger believed that they were a straightforward solution.