The lady at the other end of the line is chirpy and cheery and tells me that she has an invitation for me from Dell Corporation for an exciting event that will change my life. Ouch! What can Dell do to me that modern society has not already? And how does she have my number?

This is possibly an outsourced call centre lady calling in from her number. I am irritated. I tell her this is a DND (Do not disturb) number and that she has no right to call me on this and disturb me. My meeting mates are amused. The voice at the other end then bursts into a tirade. The lady asks me why I carry a mobile then. “Why don’t you give up your mobile and be tied to a landline instead?”

My face goes ashen. I have no answer. Voices from call centres are aggressive nowadays, dear Kavitha. This one was. But what did she do?

She salvaged her personal ego, for sure. She gave me a shocker as well. She hurt the image and equity of brand Dell in my mind indelibly. And nobody in brand Dell will ever know this. This is the downside of the outsourcing of sales calls from a call centre. At times supervisors don’t listen. At times, supervisors themselves are insensitive as to how to handle a customer, irate or not.

As call centre operations evolve, brand managers need to take extreme care to ensure that their brands, built with hard work over the decades, do not suffer at the hands and voices of outsourced entities that don’t care too much for the brand at hand. When it comes to carefully nurtured and carefully built brands, passion in the hands and hearts of everyone who handles it is a vital component of success.

This is a big issue to deal with. At times, in a bid to get the sales numbers going, companies tend to buy into outsourced modes of selling through poorly trained entities who don’t give as much importance to the brand they handle as much as to the quick call rates, conversion rates of calls to sales and the cost involved in all this. Brands get affected in the medium term through such knee-jerk selling approaches. One needs to be careful.

At the end of this recession and slowdown, do you expect the consumer to return to his/her old spending habits? And how long will that take?

- Pathi Srinivas, Chennai

Pathi, I think they will. But this time, slowly, with plenty of caution. Recession is a scar. As is an economic downturn. It leaves behind a lesion on the consumer in terms of spending ability and impulsive spending. It slows down these processes and adds a dollop of caution to everything.