European telecoms group Tele2 has moved call centre operations back to Ireland from India, reversing a trend that had seen such facilities move the other way in recent years.
A clear preference among customers for support staff with Irish accents and local knowledge lies behind the decision.
As part of a radical overhaul of its Indian call centre operations, Tele2 is moving a large part of its Irish and British customer support operations back to Europe.
The change in strategy means the creation of 26 jobs in Dublin and the potential for jobs growth as Tele2 expands in the Republic. It already supports more than 150 call centre jobs in in Gweedore, Dingle and Clonakilty, which operate its sales team.
In Britain, Tele2 will announce a similar shift in customer support jobs in the next few weeks.
"Irish people like to speak to local people," says Mark O'Toole, Tele2 managing director. "To deliver a better service to customers, we believe it is important to locate our operations in the local market."
Tele2 outsources its Irish call centre operations to third party firms such as Conduit, which is now handling all the telecoms firm's customer care enquiries.
Tele2 is just one of several Irish-based firms that are re-evaluating decisions to move call centre support operations offshore, says Denis Creighton, Conduit's chief operations officer.
"Dialect is still the big issue as far as customers are concerned but there are also cultural issues, which can make understanding more difficult," he says. "Some of our existing customers looked at India but recently pulled back."
He cites Dell as one example of a firm that considered India as a location for the bulk of its call centre activities but then decided to keep more staff in Europe.
Wage inflation in India and security concerns regarding the protection of customer data (last week the Sun reported that data obtained from an Indian call centre was sold to one of its reporters) are also damaging the Indian call centre industry.
According to IDA Ireland, Irish call centres employ 12,500 people and the agency is hoping that India's difficulty can become the Republic's opportunity.
