Indian call center lands in Ohio

To a person of Indian origin, staying in the US since 2000, this news makes me very happy that Indian companies are reacting positively to the concerns of the American people by bringing jobs back in the Us as well as giving their own customers a choice of having their customer service personnel in the US or in India. Hopefully this love would spread in Europe too.

Indian call center lands in Ohio

More foreign companies are finding that hiring Americans offers distinct advantages, reports Fortune's Jia Lynn Yang.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Jia Lynn Yang, Fortune writer-reporter
August 3 2007: 5:49 AM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- It would be easy to imagine Reno, Ohio, as the type of place that would be hit hardest by outsourcing - a small American town losing out to the invisible hand shifting jobs to places like Bangalore and Guangzhou. Instead, outsourcing is bringing the jobs to Reno. Across the street from an Army Reserve center and next to a farm, a customer-service call center hums, its 250 workers answering phones for online travel agency Expedia. The center's owner? Indian conglomerate Tata Group.

The phenomenon has a name: "insourcing," the term experts are starting to use when foreign multinationals open offices on U.S. soil and hire Americans, at a higher price, to do the very jobs they once lured overseas. In this case the center in Reno is targeted toward companies willing to pay a premium - its workers there cost up to 40 percent more than their counterparts in India - to give their U.S. customers a more culturally fluent, less frustrating 1-800 experience. (No more hearing someone read from a script ten time zones away.)

Tata isn't alone. A growing number of multinational companies are building and expanding operations on U.S. soil. Below, a few unlikely examples.

Lehui Enterprises
$12 million
The Chinese condiment maker is planning a soy sauce factory outside Atlanta.

Wipro
$150 million/office
Indian IT services firm plans to open several software development offices in U.S. college towns.

Gruma
$51.5 million
The world's largest tortilla maker, based in Mexico, will open a factory in Los Angeles in 2008.

Tata, which is based in Mumbai, established its Reno roots last year when its business services unit, SerWizSol, bought the call-center business of travel-processing firm TRX; the deal also gave it a call center in Milton, Fla. "We want to be able to say to a client, If there's a piece [of call-center operations] you want to keep in America, we can do that for you," says Ricardo Layun, head of U.S. operations for SerWizSol.