The blind cross another frontier BY A STAFF REPORTER | Wednesday, May 16, 2007 10:46:43 IST
We are all familiar with the concept of call centre employees, who do their work by viewing the data of their clients on their computer monitors. There is however, a new call centre that is now standing tall with the best of them. This is one that is operated by visually challenged people - a term that is much more inclusive than using the term blind. The call centre is called Drishti and is a joint venture of the National Association for the Blind (NAB) and Tata Indicom, a telecom service provider. It is located at the Worli Centre of the NAB. The call centre was inaugurated yesterday, but a team of 10 visually challenged people, including four girls had been functioning from April 19. The chief guest at the occasion was Rajasthan Governor, Pratibha Patil. Personnel, who were working on this project from the Tata Indicom team like Navin Chadha, chief information officer, were also present. Addressing the occasion Chadha said, "We had been planning the concept of doing something for blind people since 2004. We had experimented with 10 agents at Bangalore with the NAB. We got good a response and so we wanted to repeat it at Mumbai. We approached many NGO's but things didn't work out. So we finally approached the NAB in Mumbai and we now have results. The most amazing thing is that we have not spent more than Rs. 1 lakh for setting this up." During this period the call centre made 23,000 calls with a success rate of 80 per cent. This beats the success rate of call centres run by people who have sight. They set a record on May 2, by making 1,093 calls. Now they have set their targets on making around 1,500 calls per day. "Slowly and gradually, we want to increase the number of agents to 50," said Chadha. Pratibha Patil said, "I am very pleased to see such an innovative programme to help blind people. It's good to know that the corporate sector is coming forward to help such a noble cause." Agents of this call centre make out bound calls for Tata Indicom, to their customers, to market their various schemes especially in northern parts of the country. They use special software that has been developed by Softnet Pvt. Ltd. Bangalore known as Navigation And Expert Interaction Logic (NEIL) or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) which helps to transform data from the text form into voice form. The central server is at Bangalore and tracks the calls made by each member. One of the agents, Aparna Narkara a Ruia College graduate said, "I feel financially independent. The initial response was not good, but now its fun to work. We are paid Rs. 3 per call. 30 candidates had applied for the job, out of which 10 candidates were selected on the basis of their fluency and voice accent." They were trained by the Tata Indicom employees for 20 days. They are expected to meet a target of 100 calls per employee in their shift from 9 am to 6 pm. They make an average of around Rs. 8,000 to Rs. 9,000 every month. Another agent Praful Pandey said, "I wanted to prove that we are as capable as those who have sight. We were trained well and now we have gotten used to our job. Now there is no problem. I enjoy the work." Commenting on this project, Suhas Karnik, the secretary of the NAB said, "Our people are doing their work independently. No one helps them with it. They are able to project their ability rather than their disability. Their performance is very good. We had experimented with Mind Space, a call centre in Malad, but the software that they used was not compatible for our visually challenged agents. A bank has approached us for their loan recovery process, but it is yet to be finalised. I am pretty confident that our agents will perform as well as expected." http://www.cybernoon.com/DisplayArticle.asp?section=fromthepress&subsection=inbombay&xfile=May2007_inbombay_standard12925 To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
