Swedish home appliance maker Electrolux AB is planning to test the use of an offshore call centre in India to supplement an already busy U.S. facility in Augusta, Ga.
Tony Evans, a spokesman for Electrolux Home Products N.A., the U.S.-based division of the Stockholm-based maker of vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and other home appliances, said today that the 20-seat trial call centre in New Delhi is being tested because the company is experiencing increased sales of its products.
“That prompts us to look at some alternatives” for product support, he said.
This year, the company expects its Augusta, Ga., call centre to handle about 700,000 customer calls, a number that’s expected to rise to about two million annually over the next several years, Evans said.
The first phase of the trial call centre in India will only supplement, not replace, existing call centre operations in the U.S., he said. “There’s no impact on our employment in Georgia,” he said. “We’re looking at this in terms of our immediate needs and conducting this test to determine how we do move ahead.”
If the test is successful, he said, “it does give us some information we can include in our evaluations of our future activities, but it doesn’t direct it one way or another.”
Evans said he doesn’t know how many workers the Augusta call centre employs.
The company had US$17 billion in global revenue last year, with about 40 per cent of that in the U.S.