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Friday, April 13, 2007 India's Agents Are Not Voting on American IdolWhen we see a call center angle in the mainstream media, we dive on it. It's a dubious one here, granted, but we'll tell you about it just the same. For those of you who don't watch American Idol, Sanjaya Malakar is a mediocre singer of mixed Indian and Italian ancestry who has a large following, probably based on his flamboyance. A rumor circulated that his reality show success was actually based upon Indian call center agent support, a rumor that the Associated Press deemed scandalous enough to debunk: As for the theory that Indian call center operators are phoning in votes for Malakar: Most workers have calls automatically dialed for them by computers. They couldn't even call next door if they wanted to.That prompted comedian Mo Rocca, blogging and reporting for AOL, to do some mock investigative journalism. In a video online, we see Rocca interrogating the employees of an Indian restaurant in New York City: "Do you have a call center here?" he asks a restaurant hostess. "What call center?" She replies. "A place where you can make multiple calls from for Sanajaya," he explains. He demands to see the restaurant's phones -- there are three of them -- and accuses both the chef and the hostess of flooding American Idol with votes. He's joking, of course, but the Associated Press's dismantling of the conspiracy theory was quite earnest. The theory may have started with an AOL financial and stocks blogger, Sheldon Liber, who wrote in early March: Now I have no idea if this theory has any relevance, or if I'm the only one in the country who agrees with the judges that this kid should have been long gone, but I do know that large numbers of viewers are voting to keep him on the show and the call centers in India have the ability to make cheap calls to the United States like no other constituency. And if that is the case, does that create an unfair advantage? Can anything be done about it? Does it matter? Should anything be done about it? Should calls be restricted in some way? Maybe it has become International Idol.As any call center manager knows, outgoing calls by agents who handle incoming calls are restricted or prohibited, no matter where the center's located. The idea that India-based agents would even care enough to call on their own time is absurd. Posted by Harry Sheff on Friday, April 13, 2007 at 11:51 AM |
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