In India you don't need a test to get a driver's license, you only pay the first year for a vehicle registration, on most roads no one ever stays between the lines and at traffic lights you take your life into your own hands. Even on a red light, cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, bicycles, autos (mini cabs that carry up to 15 people), rickshaws and pedestrians all cross against the red light. Many of the roads in India are not paved including the one in front of CTI's office building in Noida, a suburb of Delhi.

 I'm still not use to seeing more people riding on the top of a bus than are inside the bus and it still freaks me out to see machine gun turrets with 50 caliber machine guns inside the airport. Leaving India I go through, not one, not two, but at times three security x-rays, the last of which usually happens in the walkway to the airplane. They also will sell you a bottle water after the first two security x-rays and take it from you in the walkway to the airplane. I've stopped buying water bottles at this point before I get onto the 15 hour plan ride back to civilization.

All in all a lot to get use to, but these are trivial when it comes to the more important things to collection agencies, debt buyers and contingency clients that place debt with CTI or outsource in India. Most India call centers run several different processes at one time on multiple shifts. They might have customer service, rebate fulfillment, debt reduction, mortgage lead generation, 411, first party collections, but there's not enough third party debt processes to go around here in India. There's a hunger here for learning third part debt collections and a hunger for learning it the ACA, professional and ethical way. India has three major markets for their call centers, the United States, The United Kingdom and Australia, which allows the India call centers to operate three shifts a day for 24 hours a day.

India has the ability to run double shifts for basically the same costs as the main shift, the only exception is they pick up and drop off their employees and feed them during the shift. However, the double shift results in amazing results for CTI and its clients. The ROI sometimes is twice what it is when their U.S. counterparts collect. Part of the reason is India can call for 16 hours a day, while the U.S. is restricted to their 8am to 5pm shift with one night a week and 1/2 day Fridays and 1/2 days Saturdays to produce against 16 hours a day six days a week.

Indians like to show up early and leave late and the U.S. tends to show up late and want to leave early. Indians pray before work and when they leave on a daily basis and bring a bit of religion and faith to their jobs whereas most U.S. citizens save their faith and religion for the weekends.

President Obama has said recently that he will look to stop giving tax incentives for those U.S. based companies that oursource. I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think that the reason most U.S. based collection related companies oursource to India is the production and their 16 hour collection days, not the tax incentives.

India is the future of third party collections and only one thing matters here, ROI and collection production period.

See you next month.