I had a chat on the phone the other day with Paul Smith, managing director of Harvey Nash outsourcing. Of course, Harvey Nash is well known as one of the world’s leading staff recruitment companies, but it also offers outsourced services. The company recently signed a new contract with Prudential in Vietnam, extending an existing relationship, and so I gave him a call to ask about Vietnam.

First I asked Paul, why Vietnam? He said: “We had a lot of feedback from clients saying that they were experiencing staff churn in India, as well as the right quality. So we wanted to influence the quality of staff in our centre by becoming the first choice – we wanted to be the elephant rather than the flea”

That’s understandable and it sidesteps many of the staffing issue faced by India at present. Paul added: “We are now expanding here by 300 per cent per annum, we get the top graduates coming out of the major cities, we have influence on the universities and we even have our own university in Hanoi. And you don’t get ‘Delhi belly’ in Vietnam.”

To be fair, I know that I’ve eaten everywhere from street-side vendors to five-star hotels in India and very rarely suffered the dreaded Delhi belly, but I do know of some people who still pack their bag full of British snacks to keep them going with risking the local tiffin.

Paul believes that the demand in India is causing a major problem when staffing projects.

“You have so much demand pushing into India now,” he said. “People like Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft are creating such huge demand at the universities that people are prepared to hop job for just a dollar more. Your domain knowledge and the ability to create long-term relationships with teams will be affected in that environment.”

I asked Paul about the move to using local call centres for dealing with local staff and he agreed entirely. In fact, he outlined that the staff at the call centre in Vietnam are actually dealing with consumers in Vietnam, not offering a far-flung service to punters here in Britain.

“Prudential is very confident about using staff in a call centre in Vietnam because they use English people to speak to English customers and Vietnamese people to speak to Vietnamese customers,” he said.

“As with Prudential, companies like HSBC and Standard Chartered also see Vietnam as a massive consumer market that is developing very fast. We do not recommend voice outsourcing into the UK market from Vietnam, though that is more of a general rule that customer service staff should be local.”

So there you have it. I mentioned this on a blog the other day because of a news story talking about this as a recent trend. I believe Harvey Nash has been working to build up its Vietnam centre over the past eight years and Paul is one of the best-known commentators in the industry, so I’m inclined to believe what he says as a fairer picture of what is really going on.