RSA to close Indian call centres

RSA is closing its Indian call centres and creating 350 British jobs by moving all customer-facing roles to the UK.

The first 100 claims-handling roles completed the move this month, while 250 sales and servicing roles will move by the middle of next year.

“The Indian teams are brilliant at following process and transactions. But for a company trying to go from good to great service, we need consistency and excellence. The missing ingredient has been culture, and that’s something we haven’t been able to recreate in India,” personal lines customer services director John Elliott told Insurance Times.

“There are parts of the market that don’t feel reassured dealing with somebody overseas, wherever it is,” he added.

One-third of calls by RSA’s personal lines and affinity customers had been picked up in India.

Around 280 of the 350 jobs will be filled internally with staff whose customer-handling roles would otherwise have been at risk of redundancy as increasing numbers of customers were using RSA’s website to interact with the insurer instead of calling the Indian centres.

The new roles will be based in RSA’s Sunderland, Liverpool and Halifax offices.

One team in India will be kept on to deal with financial customer queries such as billing reconciliation, but will only talk to RSA staff, and not its customers.

RSA has also increased the opening times of its sales and servicing call centres from 8am until 8pm to 8am until 10pm, and removed scripts from customer-facing roles. “We’re training our people to be effective, to have more confidence and to tailor the conversation to what people need,” Elliott said.