i was very interested to read your post on outsourcing in general and regarding call centres in particular. Due to mental health problems triggered by stress principally i need to work in a relatively stress free environment so i work in a call centre on the phones i ignore the targets by and large and my managers all know i'm very good on the phone but my job is being outsourced to India.
I think I do a good job because i can mostly handle the range of accents, i can handle the problems and usually diffuse the complainers. I believe in free markets and I like the idea of wealth creation going to the developing world through outsourcing. I suspect a lot of the outsourced call centres will return to locations staffed by people more linguistically in tune with the target audience. It is sometimes a challenge to catch the gist of a 70 year old Tynesider who is beginning show signs of Alzheimer's. I sometimes have to listen very carefully and i'm English with an English degree.

Call centers in India are for companies that don't give a shit about customer service.

the problem is that the people who make these outsourcing decisions are completly cut off from the day to day customer service level
they're quite happy to let customers wait on the phone for 20 minutes minimum in a queue ( i speak to people all day long who've been trying to get through to someone all day long and they phone the line i work on because it has short queues but i just have to explain that there's nothing i can do and that i have no shortcuts)
these managers see that it is a low paid job and consider it unskilled and don't understand that one of the skills in this case is having an intuititive understanding of the language, and the culture, from being raised in it ( a point which therefore includes my British-Asian colleages, born in Leicester, a city which according to Wikipedia is due shortly to have a population where the majority is not ethnically white European.)
the bean counters will learn by market forces that there is more to customer service than just having a warm body on the other end of a telephone; and that's once the customers have negiotiated the automated call menu system which customers generally hate (they can be a useful tool but there are so many badly designed ones that won't just let you speak to a person or are just plain badly designed)

RE: India: Why Apple Walked Away