The graveyard shift: What is it like working nights in Dhaka’s call centres?

Kalabagan does not look like a place that keeps American or British hours. By 10pm at night, the tea stalls are shuttering, rickshaws are thinning out, and the only real light comes from a scattering of office buildings where the workday is just beginning. 

Bangladesh has spent the better part of a decade angling to become the next big name in outsourced customer service, the country the world calls when their internet is down, or their flight is delayed. 

The ads are everywhere now, on Facebook, on lamppost banners near university gates, promising salaries that make a fresh graduate's eyes widen. Whether the reality matches the pitch depends entirely on who you ask, and on whether you actually walked through the door.

Ibnul Rahat, 22, a BBA student at ULAB, walked through it. 

He worked six months at a call centre off one of Kalabagan's narrower lanes. Before he earned a single taka, he sat through 15 days of training. Unpaid. 

"They show you the ropes, and you just have to accept that the first two weeks are free labour," he said, without much bitterness, as if this were simply the entry fee that everyone pays.

Once training ended, the real shift began, starting around 10:30 at night and running until six or seven in the morning. Pay was hourly, not salaried, somewhere between Tk70 and Tk80 an hour for most people. Rahat made 85. 

Men with bachelor's degrees and sharper accents could push past a hundred per hour, a small, informal caste system built entirely on how convincingly you could sound like you belonged on the other end of a call from Ohio or Manchester. 

The actual work was telesales dressed up in corporate vocabulary. Rahat's team was assigned to what the company called a "mission", a single outsourced product line, in his case, something called the Airduct mission for an American HVAC firm. He and a room full of near strangers spent their nights persuading homeowners on another continent to book duct cleaning services they had not asked about and mostly did not want. 

Picture it from the other end for a second. Somewhere in Ohio, a phone rings at what is, for the caller, mid-afternoon. Somewhere in Kalabagan, a 22-year-old business student is three hours into a shift, reciting a script he memorised two weeks ago, trying to sound like he is not tired, because sounding tired costs leads and leads are the only thing that keeps him employed.

This is the actual mechanics of the outsourcing boom people talk about in vaguer, more flattering terms. It is cheaper to run telesales out of Dhaka than out of Ohio, and Bangladesh is currently competing with India, Pakistan, and an increasingly dominant Philippines for the privilege of being the cheapest voice on the line. 

Executives elsewhere call this labour arbitrage in board meetings and never have to hear what it sounds like at 3am, which is mostly the low murmur of 40 people reciting variations of the same 11 sentences into 40 headsets.

Training day

A team leader sat over the floor, and the arrangement was less mentorship than quota enforcement. Five leads a month, minimum. Miss it and you were gone, no drawn-out warning process, no appeals. 

Clear it and the incentives kicked in: Tk500 for every lead past target, so a sixth lead in a month meant Tk500 extra, a seventh meant Tk1,000. It is a tidy little structure on paper. 

In practice, it meant every shift carried the low hum of a countdown, a number in the back of your head that did not go away when you got up for a bathroom break or stepped outside for five minutes of air.

The office itself did not look like the industry's own advertisements suggested. It resembled, physically, an ordinary corporate space: individual booths, a headset and script at each seat, weekly progress reports circulated so the team leader could see exactly who was falling behind. What it lacked was any sense of camaraderie. 

"Everyone was busy with their own leads. It was every man for himself," Rahat said. Most of his colleagues were students from National University or the Seven College affiliates, there for the money and largely uninterested in making friends with the person in the next booth, who was, after all, competing for the same bonus pool at the end of the month.

Women were a minority on the floor, two or three at most, and by Rahat's account, they tended to be local to the neighbourhood or working alongside a spouse, which functioned as its own informal safety arrangement. 

Not everyone who gets the ad answers it, though, and it is worth hearing from someone who came close and backed away. 

Faiaz Karim Zahin, 24, a BBA student at North South University, saw a similar post on Facebook and figured he would at least sit for the interview. 

"The salary looked promising," he said. "They wanted someone who could speak the bare minimum English, so I was quite overqualified." 

He met with the general manager and the head of HR directly, no junior recruiter reading off a laptop this time, and the interview turned, by his account, into something closer to an audition akin to Di Caprio's "sell me this pen" scene in The Wolf of Wall Street. Convince us, they told him, more or less, and he did his best impression of a man who believed in whatever product they threw at him.

The offer that followed was structurally similar to what Rahat lived through but dressed in slightly better attire: seven days of training, then a fixed salary rather than an hourly grind, Tk20,000 at minimum, climbing to Tk30,000 depending on how well the training period went. Better numbers than Rahat's outfit, on paper. But the catch sat further down the contract. They wanted a two-year commitment. 

Zahin baulked. "I couldn't sign that contract since I was unaware of their workplace culture and environment," he said, a diplomatic way of saying he was not about to hand two years of his life to a company he had known for 45 minutes.

He did the math that Rahat, in hindsight, wishes more people did before signing anything. A night shift job does not coexist peacefully with university coursework, not for long, and the money, decent as it looked, was not decent enough to justify locking himself into a schedule that would gut his sleep and his semester in equal measure. 

"The cons outweighed the pros by a lot," he said.

Illustration: TBS

Dr Abu Bakar Akan, an Associate Professor at Bangladesh Medical University, would probably tell Zahin he did the right thing, on medical grounds if nothing else. 

"Human circadian rhythm did not evolve for call centres. Chronic night work disrupts melatonin production and has been linked to higher rates of metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular strain, and mood disorders." 

Moreover, the International Agency for Research on Cancer lists circadian disruption from shift work as a probable carcinogen, a detail that rarely makes it onto a recruitment poster.

Management, unsurprisingly, sees the scenario differently. 

Sadman Naveed Islam, CEO of E&M Outsourcing, runs an operation that works exclusively at night, fixed eight-hour shifts, co-ed floor, serving mostly US businesses including B2B clients. His pay scale sits in a narrower, more modest band than either Rahat's or Zahin's organisations, Tk17,000-Tk20,000 depending on experience, and the entry bar is simpler than a two-year contract or a sales audition. Good English, mostly. 

The adjustment, in his telling, is not the job itself but the clock. "It's just staying up late," he said, when asked what trips up new hires in their first few weeks.

Islam said, "We don't put a lot of pressure on our employees. We understand sales and sometimes it's not in your control," a line that sits at some distance from Rahat's account of a hard monthly quota and a countdown that followed him to the bathroom. Islam's version has no overtime either. "It's the same eight hours every day," he said, no incentive structure stretching the night longer for one more lead.

"There is no transport for female employees once a shift ends. When they leave, they're responsible for their own, but we allow the women to stay in the office past their shift until 6:30am or 7am. When it's bright out, then they can leave," he said.

Tanvir Ibrahim, president of the Bangladesh Association of Contact Center and Outsourcing (BACCO), sees Islam's arrangement as one company's answer to a problem the industry tends to describe as structural rather than incidental. 

"Women are less represented in domestic call centres because of social and societal circumstances. There are places they cannot go because of how society views these jobs. If working in a call centre becomes a more positive idea for families, more women may be able to join," he said. 

BACCO's own pitch to member companies leans on two fixes in the meantime. "We try to ensure that there are female employees by providing transport and finding different ways around these barriers," Ibrahim said. 

"We also focus on hiring people from nearby areas, because proximity is always an important consideration for employees," said Islam.

What keeps people past the first difficult weeks, in Islam's account, is less the salary than the culture of the place, six-monthly performance reviews, the possibility of an increment, a boss who does not make himself unreachable. "You have to be approachable. People shouldn't feel that you can't approach the manager or you can't approach the boss," he said.

AI as a replacement to workers

The technology now creeping into the industry is, for the moment, mostly kept away from the calls themselves. 

"AI is not yet that popular in the industry, but it will become more common because of changing consumer behaviour. People still want a human agent because it gives them greater satisfaction. They do not want robotic answers. They want someone who understands their emotions. But the industry will gradually move towards AI," acknowledged Ibrahim.

Where AI has already made itself useful is behind the counter, in the software agents use to run a call and the way new hires are taught to use it. 

"Training content has changed, and so has the software we use to provide services," Ibrahim said. "A single system can now handle many things at once and manage different channels. AI can identify the issue and even tell me what kind of answer I need to give." 

The appeal, from the association's side, is catching up rather than getting ahead. 

"As a country, we are not as efficient as our competitors in India and Vietnam. They are ahead of us and are in a better position. AI gives us an opportunity to minimise that gap. It can help us reach India's level of efficiency and move towards international standards by improving our service quality," Ibrahim added.