September 6: Bhutan stepped into call centre business in 2007. But right from the start, the path has been fraught with numerous obstacles. Almost four years on, the situation hasn’t changed much. The Computer and Management Institute (CMI) Call Centre, one of the two call centres in operation in the country, says it is struggling to stay afloat.  The CMI call centre was established in December 2008.

People working in call centres have to be proficient in English since a huge chunk of the customers are from English speaking countries. “It is hard to get people with good communication skills and command over English language,” says Talman Chhetri, director of the CMI Call Centre adding that odd working hours is also discouraging for some. “Not many want to work at night.”

There are 35 agents and two managers working at the centre. The centre still needs over a hundred more people. Low bandwidth and poor connectivity, a problem that plagued the call centres from the early stages, remained a huge stumbling block until last July forcing Talman Chettri to shut down his call centre for two months. But, for now the connectivity problem has been solved.

Challenging though it is to keep his call centre running, the CMI’s Director has no intention of giving up easily.

Talman Chettri said a support from the government in training the workers would help him in his effort to make his call centre a success story.

The CMI call centre currently does business with EON, a power and Gas Company in the UK and Greybytes, a Computer Technical Support company based in Ireland. It also deals in data entry.