Why not?
- It's a highly educated, English-speaking workforce, and India spawns hundreds of thousands more tech engineers than America; this is a tech-savvy country.
- Time zones are not a deal-killer, either: the call center outsourcing that occured during the "1.0" years of offshoring acclimated India's white collar workforce to time zone differentials (and many of the skills developed by call center personnel are transferable to low-level PR tasks).
- Meanwhile, VOIP solutions can make it less obvious where people are calling from (if that even matters).
- Last but not least, as articles like this one point out: salaries for PR are approaching those insane levels again. Some selective outsourcing could help agencies keep employment costs down.
How much of our own work is "remote"? Sure, we meet with clients for kick-offs and try to hang out at least on a quarterly basis... but that's not that much face-time in the grand scheme of things. Plus, more often than not, the junior folks who make the calls don't attend every in-person meeting... so why would the client care if their pitch squad is based in Bangalore?
From building tstochkes to building code, from data entry to remote healthcare diagnoses, India has proven that it is up to snuff. Yes, problems have cropped up for many companies who over-committed, too early, to offshoring, but in keeping with the "2.0" trend, I wouldn't be shocked if "Offshoring 2.0" - when it comes, and it will - knocked us on our butts (again), and gnashes it fangs at the PR/whitecollar industry.