Dell Moves Call Center Back to US

alphakappa writes "Fox reports that Dell is moving its call center operations for the Latitude and Optiplex computers back to the US from Bangalore, India after an onslaught of complaints from dissatisfied customers who couldn't cope with the differing accents and scripted responses. Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognize that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centers around the world doesn't result in customer appreciation and better quality?"

Coming back? No.

Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognize that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centers around the world doesn't result in customer appreciation and better quality?

For call centers, perhaps, but I wouldn't bank on having the IT jobs return from cheaper lands. If the IT geek doesn't have to deal with the end user then the language barrier is virtually nonexistent, at least as far as the masses are concerned.

Does the primary language of the person who programs your dialog boxes really matter?

Re:Coming back? No.

For call centers, perhaps, but I wouldn't bank on having the IT jobs return from cheaper lands. If the IT geek doesn't have to deal with the end user then the language barrier is virtually nonexistent, at least as far as the masses are concerned.
Does the primary language of the person who programs your dialog boxes really matter?

IT jobs require significant interaction from a Software Engineering standpoint. Having your architects/sales/management on one side of the world and ppl doing the "grunt" work on the other side can be very frustrating and impede progress.

Re:Coming back? No.

Have you ever worked in software engineering? "We want software that does x" is NEVER that simple. There will always be lots of back and forth between those who want the software written, and those who are writing it.

Re:Coming back? No.

There will always be lots of back and forth between those who want the software written, and those who are writing it.

I was reading an article in either an IEEE magazine or an ACM magazine not too long ago, and the authors claimed that outsourced software might be of higher quality precisely because of the absence of back and forth that's around in-house. Management (or whoever wants the software written) is forced to spend more time defining requirements properly before handing them over to the programmers.

There are really two separate issues: 1. Management doesn't tell the programmers what they really want in the software, and 2. Management doesn't actually know what they really want in the software. If #1 is the dominant problem, then outsourcing might get you better software because the requirement docs might be better on average, but if #2 is the dominant problem, then outsourcing might get you worse software because there isn't enough feedback getting back to management.

Re:Coming back? No.

In my experience, the dominant problem is your #2-labelled issue. I've been on too many projects where management has an ultra-vague idea of what they want, and they end up, like I said before, with huge amounts of back-and-forth between themselves and the programming team.

I agree, though, that the problem you labelled as #1 is out there, and that outsourcing would be a nice push toward fixing that problem.

Perhaps I've just been unlucky?

Re:Coming back? No.

#2 (Management doesn't know what they want) has ALWAYS been the dominant problem during the 20+ years I've been programming. They are always willing to TELL programmers what to build, but usually there needs to be back and forth because it's obvious to the programmers that no one would want what product management has specified. Have grunts 12,000 miles away build exactly what has been specified cheaply isn't going to improve the situation.

Re:Coming back? No.

The obvious solution is to move management over to India also. Then it is all done cheaply in the same place.

Re:Coming back? No.

Even if management supplied a very detailed set of requirements, this still happens because the business problem changes. What was a perfect design a few months ago doesn't quite fit anymore. That's why businesses hire programmers in the first place. Otherwise, everything would be shrinkwrapped software.

Re:Coming back? No.

What i'd like much better is moving Management to India, and keeping the software jobs in the U.S.

Re:Coming back? No.

Usually programmers cannot understand management anyways so the language barrier would not be a problem.

Re:Coming back? No.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. I am currently working on a fairly large project from the I/T side and during the requirements gathering phase we noticed a pretty significant phenomenon. The customer teams and the I/T teams were distributed all over the US and we'd be on meetings ALL day on the phone, and the requirements werent really getting carved into stone. After 3 months of phone deliberations, we had a face to face meeting with everyone involved in requirements gathering, and bam! - in three days we jumped from 30% to 80% of the requirements getting "done".

Then onto the development phase - we noticed that when requirements are communicated to developers who are remote, this works much less efficiently than developers who are local. There are two reasons for this. (1) Developers simply do not read what is documented and prefer to hear the same thing on the phone (2) What is documented is quite often not covering every little aspect of the requirements and when developers ask questions on such unclear portions, the communication loop delays are very significant and drag out things.

Re:Coming back? No.

we had a face to face meeting with everyone involved in requirements gathering, and bam! - in three days we jumped from 30% to 80% of the requirements getting "done

So you're saying discussing the issues in person kicked it up a notch?

Re:Coming back? No.

"The company in North America would just say "we want software that does x."

My experience as a consultant is that the "does x" is something like "increases sales" or "reduces costs".

Most of project management and software design is translating "does x" into a set of requirements that can be realised as a piece of software.

If you do not have an ability to map business requirements to software requirements in-house the likelihood of getting something usable from an offshore development company is akin to winning the Powerball lottery.

Re:Coming back? No.

Yeah, but how long until you have companies with only sales and execs in North America simply ordering their software from "Development to go" companies in India?

Oh that happened long ago. And it was actually much more common during the dotcom boom than today. The results were not always too good, my company bought the assets out of bankruptcy of the main competitor to one of our divisions, despite having had a dominant position and a three year head start they failled because their software quality was crud and the customers knew it.

I don't expect the outsourcing binge to continue forever. Labor is cheaper in India but not cheap. If you want a trained programmer they are expensive. The living standard that that programmer will enjoy in India is vastly better than that of most dotcom millionaires. They will have a large house, several servants, western quality education, health care etc.

The only reason that outsourcing is cheaper is that the exchange rates reflect trade balances rather than parity of living standards. India's trade balance is going to grow as outsourcing becomes more popular. The rupee will strengthen against the industrialized currencies. This is inevitable in any case, it is chronically undervalued and the economy is growing rapidly.

This is the way free trade and the free market works. Outsourcing is an abitrage play and over time abitrage eliminates the price differentials it exploits.

Re:Been there...fixed that

Sure...but the truth is the specific issues that surface can happen locally as well. All it takes is patience, persistence and constant communication between both sides. This approach will result in the remote specific issues fading to the background.

Remote administration is routine, and it's not going away. Best to learn now how to deal with it. Find and buttress the strong points while weeding out the weak ones. Visit the remote site at least once and dig into the culture. Learn to train your ear to deal with different accents. Put yourself in the other side's shoes and don't forget to consult a calendar so you know when their holidays occur :)

For one, you're ignoring time differences. There's also more to working with foreign teams than accents. Not being able to walk down the hall and grab some people to hash out an issue and get some face-time is important too.

Re:Been there...fixed that

>> 'face time' can be a Western concept.

Face time is not a 'western' concept. Since when is human interaction and body language 'western'?

Since when is grabbing a sheet of copy paper and a pencil to draw a diagram 'western'?

I don't think that these concepts keep me in a box. As a matter of fact, the teams of people that I'm working with in India and Japan agree that the lack of face time is a serious problem with the offshore model.

How to reduce the problem? We're spending more time up front making VERY precise functional requirements documents. Now that we're into tech design, this has helped. Now we're looking for precise technical specs. Trying to replace body language and "you know what I'm trying to say right?" with precise english.

And even though it's hell for my personal life (my wife is a saint), talking to these guys every day at midnight and 7:00AM keeps the communication flowing.

Personally I hate the offshore model. But I have to learn to work with it, somehow. Either the model will stay, and I'll know how to package work and manage it. Or it will fail horribly(my preference) and I'll still have better management and requirements gathering skills to continue my career.

wbs.

True True

My mom is a corporate sociologist, and she works with companies that have outsourced to other countries to help communication flow between the often very different cultures. One of the biggest issues she's found with software outsourcing in Asia is that many of those programmers will only do what they're told, without any personal input and doing whatever the outsourcer wanted regardless of the logic of it.

This can frustrate both ends, as the programmer thinks the stuff sucks, but keeps quiet because that's how it's done in his culture, and the boss is upset because the stuff comes back just like he said it, but it sucks. This can then lead to the outsourcing company being fired and lost productivity, etc.

Re:Coming back? No.

Another thing I've always wondered about is confidentiality. Say I farm out the programming of my next big internet thang to some foreign company. What's to say that company could resell (or at least reuse) some of that code when they do the same coding for my competitor when they want in on the next big thang too?

If not that, what about the programmers bleeding out code?

Imagine you're running a programmer sweat shop and you get two companies wanting the same sort of thing. Why write it twice. Reuse code, profit. And if it's closed source, each company will never know they helped subsidise the code for their competitor and visa-versa.

Re:Coming back? No.

And an NDA does not mean much when you're dealing with a foreign outsourcing shop. Would you want to have to go to court in a foreign country to enforce it? I wouldn't bet on you receiving a fair trial in most cases.

Re:Coming back? No.

Imagine what would happen if you host any data overseas. If some big financial institution wants to move some/all of their data overseas, what recourse with that host gov't will they have if someone locally steals it? Are the host countries going to go after one of there own and help out a Chase bank, I think not.

Re:Coming back? No.

>>some big financial institution wants to move some/all of their data overseas, what recourse with that host gov't will they have if someone locally steals it?

Or what if Pakistan nukes Mumbai?

wbs.

Denied by Dell

Apparently this has already been denied by Dell:

http://web.mid-day.com/news/nation/2003/november/6 9623.htm [mid-day.com]

Re:Coming back? No.

>>What's to say that company could resell (or at least reuse) some of that code when they do the same coding for my competitor when they want in on the next big thang too?

This code sharing thing happens over there.

I've been approached with a proposal like this by our offsite coordinator. I told him that I DID NOT WANT ANY ONE ELSE'S CODE IN MY SYSTEM except for open source solutions. This was backed up by emails from myself and my boss. God forbid we got caught with someone else's code.... what a fsking disaster that would be.

However, we did interview and bring on 2 of the key guys from that other project. :)

Thinking aboot this a little more, I wonder who it is that's ultimately responsible for ensuring that the codebase is pure. The US team? Or the offshore guys? This sounds kind of like the SCO issue, I know. But this is a legitimate concern, I think.

Hmm. Must talk to boss about risk.

Whos says that posting to /. has nothing to do with work? I'm gonna' set up a meeting to talk to my boss about this tomorrow.

wbs.

p/g

Re:Coming back? No.

There was an article I read not too far back about a Pakistani woman threatening to release private medical information of patients for a particular hospital because she hadn't been paid for her transcription service.

Turns out the hospital had outsourced it here in the US, that company had outsourced it to ANOTHER company, which then outsourced it to Pakistan.

Speaking for myself, I'm not very thrilled with that many groups having access to my private info, let alone groups that are outside the reach of US law enforcement.

Re:Coming back? No.

Accurate summary. If anyone's interested, here's the full article. Interesting in that it was a highly respected hospital as well (UCSF).

Link to article. [sfgate.com]

Re:Coming back? No.

well if the "error" dialog reads

"Thank you, come again!"

It might just be too comical to even try and get work done.

Re:Coming back? No.

Does the primary language of the person who programs your dialog boxes really matter?

Let's see:

"Are you sure you want to delete this file?"

Or:

"Sure are you would enjoy this file to remove?"

Yes. Yes it does matter.

- Tony

Re:Coming back? No.

Let's see: "Are you sure you want to delete this file?" Or: "Sure are you would enjoy this file to remove?" Yes. Yes it does matter.

No, it doesn't. Users are going to click "YES" anyway, without reading the warning, then call you later to say they're missing a file and need it restored from tape.

Re:Coming back? No.

"Would you please not to delete this file?"
What you expect to answer depends on your dialect. I'm dead serious on this.

In any part of America, "would you please not to delete this file?" is incorrect grammar. Hiring local programmers does not help your cause if you hire illiterate ones.

Exactly - and more

It could say "The gostak distims the doshes; OK?" and they would click Yes. Hell, *I* would click Yes. Life is too short to figure everything out all the time. Because it's not a dialog in isolation. It's part of your life. You've been tussling with this program for hours. You need to take a leak. It's time to mow the lawn and pay the bills. You're hungry. Your girlfriend just came into the room in a red lace teddy.

Re:Exactly - and more

"A little OT, but I once got into trouble with my girlfriend because she sent me out to the store to run some errands. When I came home she was sitting on the couch wearing nothing but a black lace teddy, watching TV. I looked at her and smiled. Then, like the attention deficit disorder that I am, hearing the Simpson's theme song come from the TV, I said "ooh! the Simpson's is on!" and promptly plopped down on the couch next to her to watch some TV. Well, she about had it. She was completely offended that I didn't focus all of my attention on her and told all of her girlfriends that I was a shitty boyfriend."

So what's the big deal? You can't mess with her AND watch the Simpsons? Just either get her to give you a blow job or do her from behind...either way, you can have fun, and STILL see the tv....

Gotta learn to multi-task there dude...

Re:Coming back? No.

no the language barrier is not a problem... the Quality of the code certianly is.

Code quality for a couple of the vertical apps we use cince it was moved "overseas" has dropped so far that several of the offices here have reverted to a version that was pre-outsourcing just to avoid the bugs and instability.

when your product quality drops so badly that your customers will happily use a non-supported version and pay the IT guys to write a data-conversion tool to use it? something is certianly wrong....

Re:Coming back? No.

Poor code quality is not solely a result of moving to offshore programming.

American programmers can write equally poor code.

Re:Coming back? No.

Agreed. When the almighty buck is most important, companies will find a way to get around all barriers. It shocks me that Dell is moving the operation back to the US, instead of dealing with the issue, and hiring language coaches (and no I dont want these jobs to leave the North America to begin with). 10 to 1 says they move back with 5 years.

Money is money. Bottom line!

Given How Unhelpful They Are.. Guess Not

Does the primary language of the person who programs your dialog boxes really matter?

Now that you mention it, probably not... I mean even if
This application has generated an error and will now terminate

got switched to something like
Your application is full of eels

I end up with about the same amount of useful information.

Blockwars [blockwars.com]: multiplayer, head to head, and free

Re:Given How Unhelpful They Are.. Guess Not

Your application is full of eels

That's Hungarian.

I will not buy this application, it is scratched!
If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?
Drop your panties, Sir William, I cannot wait until lunch time!

http://www.talpak.org/alakulat/python/jelenetek/hu ngarian.html [talpak.org]

For corporate customers ONLY

Note that this is only for Latitude and Optiplex machines for corporate customers, this is not for normal home users. From the article:
"Calls from some home PC owners will continue to be handled by the technical support center in Bangalore, India, and Weisblatt said Dell has no plans to scale back the operation there."

So, it looks like quality won't be increasing for the average Joe. Dell will probably keep sending support calls from home users to India until it makes enough "cents" to do otherwise.

Re:For corporate customers ONLY

Actually, it says that corporate customers account for 85% of Dell's business, not 85% of calls.

Yeah, Home Corporate

One thing I've learned from working with Dell for the past few years is that they don't give a flip about their home users... But then again, why should they? They make money off corporate/government contracts, not supporting grannies who don't know where the any key is.

After having such good experiences with Dell in the Office, we started recommending people buy Dell for their home, too. Oh boy BIG mistake. The hardware is substandard, just about every default installation is munged somehow or another, and the things generally stop working within a year. *NO ONE* I know has gotten a good Dell home PC recently. Meanwhile we noticed a definite decrease in quality of customer support in the past year...

Me: Here's an article from Adobe that says there's a known issue between this motherboard and Adobe Acrobate 5.5, what's the solution?
Faceless E-mail Tech: Here's an article on how to troubleshoot Windows 2000 startup problems.
Me: Argh!

Ad infinitum.

On that note, is there any big name manufacturer that still makes/supports good home machines? People always ask me recommendations but I'm out of them, other than "Just buy a Mac".

Jesus Shaves .... and other language difficulties.

Here's a great article originally in the Hindustan Times [rajiv.com] about a perplexed Indian visiting the states.

I worked TDY in our reservations center in London (for my former employer, an airline) and was asking the lady to give me her address so we could mail the tickets. And she said "two ten" and I said "two ten what?" and she said "two ten!" and I said "two ten what?" and she "Tooting! It's Tooting you idiot!"

If you want a REALLY hilarious article regarding cultural differences and language confusion read Jesus Shaves [esquire.com] by David Sedaris.

Re:Jesus Shaves .... and other language difficulti

First sentence:

I have lived in the US a little over 30 years now, and am thoroughly Americanised in the usage of English.

But not in its spelling, apparently.

Not good enough

This is only for their business lines of computers, not for the consumer level, and has nothing to do with accents. They were getting a lot of flak from their corporate clients for outsourcing. Dell simply does not want to alienate their corporate (read: where the real money is) customers.

Re:Not good enough

Every few support calls I get an email from Dell asking me to fill out a survey. On a recent one I complained about the poor quality of support I had received. After dealing mainly with the people from the server support division the complete lack of clue and ability was very, very obvious. Good to know companies still listen to their consumers. Seems obvious, but many don't.

I was talking with a woman yesterday who said she was getting very bad service from HP's support system. But she never complained to anyone. We as consumers must remember that if we just idly accept whatever the corporates throw at us this is the kind of treatment to expect. I can't speak for the rest of the world but here in America the desire for the absolute cheapest solution possible is slowly killing us. We complain about poor service, no help, etc. but then we go shop at the Super Mega Mart because their product is 5 cents cheaper.

Sorry for the vent. My point is, we need to vote with our money and complain to the management when things are not how we want them.

Answer

No!

Next stupid question please.

Not surprising really

Some functions outsorced to India (or wherever for that matter) work out well, and some don't. Speaking from experience, we just completed a major project with a firm in India, which helped us greatly, producing quality code with few bugs (about the same ratio as an equivalent U.S. Programmer).

However afterwards we didn't feel that for our clientele they would provide adequate support and maintenance programming capability so they were released from there. So now it's my job to do some of the front line maintenance for this code and respond to customer issues with minor tweaks as needed.

In short: no one solution is a magic bullet, everything needs careful analysis.

Re:Not surprising really

I'm not sure whether this was intended as a troll or not, but to stand up for them I'll bite:

Their code and comments was well written easy to understand, as referenced in parent it was high quality. Honestly I think the decision to outsource that code to India was a very good decision from a business standpoint. Did it cost a coder a job here? Not really we're hiring...

Re:Not surprising really

>> Did it cost a coder a job here? Not really we're hiring

You can't possibly be serious. How many people worked on the project in India? How many people were employed in the analysis, design, development, documentation, management processes in India? So you're hiring a coder or two to handle the maintenance and production support phase of the project. That's no consolation to the tens or hundreds (depending on the size of the project) who lost their jobs or couldn't get the jobs in the first place.

I'm very happy that your project worked out for you. Now, please be so kind as to tell us what company you work for so those of us with a conscience can avoid your products/services.

Oh, and before someone mods me as a Troll, consider this: outsourcing has nothing to do with the quality of the job performed but with the (mythical) cost savings involved. The decision to outsource overseas is a short-sided financial one that is doing harm to the local economy and will eventually come back to bite the outsourcer in the ass. For if you don't pay people to work, they can't afford to buy your product. This, of course, forces further cost cutting measures, which only hurtles the company into a death spiral. Hilarity ensues.

This has nothing to do with isolationalism, either. Notice that I have made no mention of my home country, as this is happening in many countries. The simple fact is that these decisions are being driven by short-sided, amateurish stockholders who have no comprehension of base economics and lack the ability to look beyond the figures for Next Quarter.

I wish I could remember where I read the article , Robert Kiyosaki maybe, but one of the major problems with the current economy (US, EU, whereever) is that stockholders don't care to look at a company's 3 or 5 or 7 year plan anymore. It's all about Next Quarter. It's this pressure that is causing outsourcing, as well as the unusual barrage of accounting scandels.

Until investors and corporate shareholders return to a sensible economic approach to investing in business, this trend will only continue to increase.

Re:Not surprising really

I'm just mystified as to how you believe that we would EVER be able to compete without becoming a third world country ourselves?

It's what marketers and sales people call your "Value Proposition". If you offer more value than they do for the price you're bidding, you should expect to eke out a living.

I am a business owner of a startup business that is growing and doing web marketing, and I have a hard time believing the times are as rough as they say. Adapt, organize, and put together your own value proposition. Root, hog, or die. It's your choice to make.

Re:Not surprising really

> So now it's my job to do some of the front line maintenance for this code and respond to customer issues with minor tweaks as needed.

Ok few bugs.. honest question:

How well documented is the code? The English? Can you tell yet whether the code being outsourced to India has made your current job harder? If so by how much?

Thanks.

I suspect we use the same company

Our call center is in Bangalore just like the Dell one. The company that runs it is called Convergys. I went to their website and they are "proud to be an ethnically diverse company" I guess that means they have Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims answering the phones.

Re:I suspect we use the same company

Convergys has call centers in the US and Canada as well as India. I don't know how they choose whose calls go where, but it's not like they're simply an Indian call center. They're actually hiring phone monkeys in the US and Canada too.

Well...

I for one welcome _back_ our call center overlords!

Hello, and Thank You for Calling Dell

Hello and thank you for calling Dell!

Here at Dell, we care about our customers and have changed our menu system...please listen closely.

To speak to a guy from Calcutta who will have problems giving you scripted answers to the simplest problems, press 1

To speak to some dope from Texas who will handle your problem like a bucking bull at a rodeo, please press 2

To speak to your average nerd who will solve your issue in the most condescending way possible, please press 3

It's discrimination!!!... not

It's really anoying when people with very little english answer phones, and work in places where they deal with customers (fast food is a big one).

I'm tired of paying money, and having to call several times to find someone who I can "somewhat" understand. I've more than once called, to get someone who I couldn't understand.

It's not just Dell whose done this... many companies have.

And it's annoying.

I couldn't care who is on the other end. I have the following requirements regardless:
- Good English skills - must understand and speak WELL
- No scripting - must be knowledgeable on the topic and products/services offered

That's all I ask. Someone who can be understood, and can understand... and knows what they are doing at their job.

American call stations can be just as bad. I remember calling Verisign (yea them) and getting someone who didn't know what "DNS" stood for. Yea! That was helpful.

Re:It's discrimination!!!... not

It's really anoying when people with very little english answer phones

That's just what I think. Except that more often than not it's when there are Americans at the other end of the phone. I find that Indians at least make an effort to enunciate all of the syllables in their words.

w00t!

our company was one of the dissatisfied customers, we've been pushing for this for the past six months as its been just unbearable.

the worst part about it was that they knew the problem existed. if you somehow magically got somebody in the US that could help you, they'd finish the call in 5 minutes, no prob. if you got India, not only would it take an hour, but then they would have to transfer you to a 'quality control agent' who was basically a US operator that would repeat the entire course of the call to make sure they did the right thing!

Jobs

I don't mind competing with other programmers for jobs, regardless of where they're from. I just wish that employers were able to recognize who is qualified for a job and who isn't. I've personally lost plenty of opportunities to US programmers who were not qualified and screwed up a project, only to have the client come back and have me fix it, except now most of their budget is gone.

Educational differences...

I worked for one of the first companies to open a call center in India, ours was in Chennai. We started doing it in 1993.

We hired a guy with a PhD in education to teach us how to work with the Indians and to help the Indians understand us. I've got a copy of one of his papers and it makes good reading.

The largest problem is the difference in education systems. In the US we stress problem solving above all else, in India and other parts of Asia memorization is king. Our problem with our Indian employees became that if we gave them a procedure they could follow it easily but they couldn't develop the procedure on their own, thus everything must be scripted because the typical call center agent can't think on their feet.

As far as communication differences we employed an American accent program to help smooth out the Indian accent. For the guys we put on the phone in outbound situations it worked great and they were easily understood. Some of the other folks needed a lot more help.

It all comes down to how much you're willing to pay for good equipment and good training, both for the Indian employees and the Americans responsible for supervising the overseas call center.

As if American Accents aren't hard enough...

Most of the rest of the world has problems with the American accents, of which there are serveral that sound nothing like the English spoken in my parts of Canada. When we say 'about' they hear aboot, because they are used to the oo sound being an ugh sound.

"Rebught yughr comughter now."

Re:As if American Accents aren't hard enough...

...there are serveral that sound nothing like the English spoken in my parts of Canada.

Your parts of Canada are irrelevant.

Oh. Wait.

All parts of Canada are irrelevant.

Re:As if American Accents aren't hard enough...

It's a joke. Geopolitical humor, if you will. Just like all the other jokes that are being made about "dot-head" tech support. Get over it. You made jokes about Americans (and got modded "Funny") so why can't Americans make jokes about Canadians? Do you think Canadians have a monopoly on comedy?

Oh. Wait.

Dan Ackroyd, John Candy, Kids in the Hall, Lorne Michaels, Tom Green, Jim Carrey, Rick Moranis, Norm MacDonald, Mike Myers, Eugene Levy.... I guess they do.

Hyuck Hyuck. That's an "American" sound for laughter. Hope you can understand some of this.

Myopia

From the article:
In afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Dell was up 67 cents at $35.19.

There are social [nomoreh1b.com] movements [meetup.com] about to save american jobs in the technical sector. As horrible as this is bound to be for the economy at home, it's always been "bout tha dollar dollar bill y'all" so this is the one and only thing that will bring these jobs back to American soil.

My girlfriend and I had dinner one night recently with the CTO of CS First Boston (he's a church buddy of hers) who was responsible for the decision to move many of the jobs of his subbordinates. This is a topic that I feel quite passionate about, but due to the nature of the social occasion I was understanably polite about it. But I felt the need to at least mention it and perhaps have a rare opportunity to get into the mind of someone calling the shots in this capacity.

Among the points that I raised was that from a national security standpoint, American companies are creating a great incentive for cultures across the globe to become technically savvy. A good many of these cultures may likely be unfriendly to the USA and the companies creating these incentives. By the same token, I believe that knowledge of computing is so far reaching that there is an element of historical inevitability to all cultures acquiring this knowledge. But I still believe that American companies are accelerating forces that they may not even realize are beyond their control in order to impact their finances in a very immediate way. In my view, it's just myopia. Plain and simple.

Vote with your $$

A friend of mine who runs a fairly succesfull accounting business was nearly ready to purchase a brand new software package to repair that years returns, when he discovered that the tech support was out sourced to india. Now, my friend has no more technical knowledge than the average Joe (and sometimes less) but he knew that he did not want to deal with people in an different country every time he had a problem. He eventually got the CEO on the line and told him exactly why he had lost a sale. Needless to say I was quite impressed. The CEO's excuse: everyones doing it.

Re:Vote with your $$

Two of the biggest culprits behind "everyone is doing it" are Accenture and Mackenzie. I like one of Accenture's services "Human Performance" and of course they also list "Outsourcing". They are making a lucrative business out of going from company to company telling them which parts of the company to offshore and how to do it. Unfortunately HR consulting can't be easily offshored so they can't get a taste of their own medicine. If you see these snakes...errr...people coming in the door, get your resume and unemployment insurance paperwork in order.

Unfortunately, from the perspective of the overpaid executives the argument is unavoidably compelling. Labor costs are so integral to profit margin that there has always been constant pressure to reduce labor costs. American labor made a lot of gains in the 20th century which started out with conditions about as dismal as most of the third world has now. Unfortunately with the development of free trade, cheap telecommunications and a very efficient air and sea freight expensive American labor has become largely a liability unless you're in a service business that requires you're body be in the U.S. Of course there is also a solution for service, immigrants legal or illegal. Its no secret why there is so little enforcement of immigration law in the U.S and why H1B visas are so popular. It provides a vast pool of ultra cheap labor for service jobs, labor that by definition can't compain about poor working conditions. If you work for a living in the U.S. the good times are over.

Dell's action is commendable until you read that they apparently didn't sack anybody in India so presumably they just shifted all of their inferior customer service in India to individuals who haven't got the clout to effectively complain.

Useless in any country

Dell is notorious for utterly worthless tech support. If you don't have standards, your location is irrelevant.

I've predicted this would happen

This is but the beginning of the backlash... Customers are going to make companies who do not employ English speakers who are easily understood pay for it in the wallet...

Dell would not have done this unless they had been scared into doing it...

It really pisses me off when I have to open a Novell or Microsoft support incident (which cost $300 each) and they give me someone in India who I can't understand...

Re: I've predicted this would happen

> It really pisses me off when I have to open a Novell or Microsoft support incident (which cost $300 each) and they give me someone in India who I can't understand...

Most companies I call give me someone in the USA that I can't understand. It's nothing to do with IT; it's the crappy pay scale and the sociology of who gets the crappy-paying jobs.

Not a surprise

I worked tech support for Dell for a year on the business Latitude/Inspiron lines. Often we would take calls from the home and small business customers desperate, often begging not to be transferred to India. There was no reason the Indian support couldn't be trained to the same level as the US support (Dell has excellent in house training for its techs), but for some reason the Indians were mostly trying to solve problems using a decision tree tool.

The US support was constantly being pressed to update the tool, but like many corporate IT programs the tool was written/updated by another department that did not handle customers on a daily basis, and the tool was fairly sparse.

The biggest issue is the the tool did not take into account the customers prior support history... if the customer's cdrom won't read, and yesterday you replaced it, today you need to replace the mainboard... etc. I also heard persistant rumors of rapid turnover in India...Tech would get trained and jump ship to other companies in Bangalore.

Like most tech support departments, Dell has customer that have a miserable time (my sister has had 8 service calls on a 1.5 year old system). The truth is that most tech support calls (80-90%) are FTF (First Time Fix).

Is there any inconsistency here?

The question on my mind is -- how many of those companies that complained about the quality of the customer service themselves have offshored their tech support or other operations? Will they see the irony themselves, or will that little bit of cognitive dissonance be swept under the rug?

Thank Christ,

Because dealing with Dell's offshore support people is a nightmare. I have an Inspiron 8100 and a few months ago the AC adaptor died. Pretty frickin' easy to diagnose IMHO. Unfortunately, Dell didn't think so. I was literally on the phone for 45 minutes talking to a girl who made me jump through EVERY hoop possible. I can understand if it's your grandma calling up and has no idea what the hell's wrong with her computer, but that's not exactly the case with me. Numerous times I told the girl on the phone that "Actually, I do tech support for a Fortune 500 company, and I know what's wrong. I just NEED a new AC ADAPTOR." Apparently she didn't care.

It wasn't until I literally offered to email her manager my resume to prove I knew what the hell I was talking about before they decided I needed a new adaptor. Then it was another 20 minutes for them to try to spell my address.

Re:Thank Christ,

If you're certain of the answer, the best thing to do is simple say you tried "a known good" AC adapter or whatever and it worked. Almost all of the Dell support trees have an option for "tested with known good" and the solution is, duh, replace the part. Calls like that we could wrap up in 2-3 minutes.

What, employees aren't commodities?

Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognize that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centers around the world doesn't result in customer appreciation and better quality?

No, because that would imply that a major American company is taking a diametric turn from the growing trend to consider employees as completely interchangeable commodities.

That happened to me in spades at my last job, from which I was unfortunately laid off recently (sad to lose the pay, not the job). I am a Windows developer with 16 years of professional programming experience and long history of developing superior code, but was directly told to write no code which could not be understood by an entry-level non-C++ programmer. This does _not_ mean to write good, clean, well-documented code. This literally means that I was not allowed to write anything more complex than brain-dead C code, even though this project was developed with Visual C++. For instance, all memory allocation was done in fixed-size arrays, meaning if you exceeded one of the many arbitrary limits, the program crashed and you had to hunt down and find the proper #define to increase to make the array big enough. Of course allocating 70-some thousand instance of some object that was used many 500 times was one of the lesser adverse side-effects of such nonsense.

The idea of using something so simple as a CArray was beyond these people's experience and they were afraid that in bringing too much of this thinking on board, they would find themselves at a point where they couldn't swap bodies and have a new person pick (who theoretically didn't have any C++ experience) could pick it up and run with it.

Encapsulating the hard parts to make the rest easier to use was not only met with resistance, but actively condemned. I was truly being treated as a body warming a seat rather than having my substantial skills and experience utilitized in a meaningful way.

Why, might you ask, did they hire me then? I don't know, and no one could answer that question. On the other hand the pay was decent and it gave me something to do (struggling to keep sane from boredom is a challenge). I fear for the project, however, since I was just about the only one asking the tough questions, while the party line was to blunder along blindly and fix problems only when they showed up.

The power of the customer

I hope the business world is playing close attention- and I hope all the "lets cut our budget for customer service" pencil necks are told promptly by their CEOs to, well, just shut the hell up. The customer is always right. Always. Repeat that. Keep the customer happy, and they will keep buying from you; keep more customers happy than your competitors, and you will do better than your competitors. Do it with efficiency, and you will make money. That's what all business boils down to. Good product, good service and efficiency = profit. Walk into any small manufacturing business, and you'll probably see the same sign I've seen countless times: "for every customer you who walks away angry, you loose 10 more." "Joe's Iron Works" understands it better than Dell, apparently...and one exec at Dell makes probably more than all the employees of JIW combined.

Any management listening? Here's an open threat from those of us that have to buy stuff from you. Make my job harder when it's most important, when I'm most in need, and you'll find an instant enemy and I'll screw you at every chance. That includes cheap equipment, harassing salespeople, any more than 2-3 voicemail choices for getting support, waiting for more than 5 minutes for support, or dealing with someone who I can't understand or is incompetent. Show competence in my time of need, and I'll reward you with praise to my supervisors- and they're the ones deciding where the money goes. That simple.

No

Basically, this is one small happening against the general tide. India seems to be against elocution classes but there are plenty of other countries w/ no problem at all. Take the philippines for example. The medium of instruction is in english. And the elocution classes are quite popular there.

I have a friend in the philippines now who told me of a guy he met there. This guy as a bar trick would speak in a different american accent every couple of minutes. Southern, boston, brooklyn, etc. My buddy grew up in Queens and testified that his Brooklyn accent was spot on. This guy is probably on the higher end of the skillset but the call center he worked for paid for his training. The deal was that they would speak to whomever called in a similar accent. They even had scripted "i am from Prattsburgh!" responses (close to the caller but not close enough to be quized).

Point being is that the jobs won't move back to the states but the skillset will improve to the point where we can't tell the operator is overseas.

Corporate propaganda - plain and simple

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/7345 841.htm [miami.com] "We did not send back any calls to the U.S.," the Dell International Services' spokeswoman in the high-tech hub of Bangalore, said on Tuesday. The spokeswoman said she did not want to be quoted by name. "Now, I don't know why Jon said that," the Dell spokeswoman in Bangalore said. "We are committed to India and we are growing."

Hurray?

I don't want to diss anyone from foreign lands, and i don't mean to make blanket statements...

but a majority of the things i hear about using coders and admins from these places sounds as though it would be a counterproductive business strategy.

A case in point- a friend of mine (who btw, isn't prejudiced at all) used to work for a county job in SoCal. He would say that a lot of the code written and sent over by the interns from the middle east was just horrible. Often it would just barely "function", and when it would break, whoever was stuck with maintaining it would take one look at it and decide it would be easier to just rewrite it from scratch.

Things like variables named sequentially ("aa, ab, ac, ad, ae..."), no comments, or comments that rarely made sense or were ambiguous, etc etc.

Sometimes the application wouldn't work at all, and it would have to be either rewritten or have hundreds of hours of time invested into it before it could be used.

Sure there are plenty of native coders that get pumped out of some 2-year degree mill and are probably just as bad, but the job market seems to be infiltrated with foreign coders doing just this.

The main thing is that they aren't ready to do the job they are doing. With some more practice and experience maybe, but they aren't ready to make market-ready code. This sort of thing wouldn't fly from a U.S. coder, but businesses put up with it from the offshore coders because they can pay slave labour wages to them. It is sad because native coders and admins are out of work, and the offshore coders are being borderline exploited.

Hopefully businesses are learning that this sort of thing often means having to do stuff twice- that their own greed is costing them more money than they thought.

Corporate Customers talk longer.

Corporate customers of Dell (of which I am one) REJOYCE! I'm a tech monkey for a big-10 university and I personally support 60+ machines, all but a handfull are Dell's. It's bad enough that we fork out bou-kou bucks for tech support but we use it much more frequently than standard home users. Usually we are technically competent, much moreso than the Indian at the other end of the phone line. So when we are VERY SURE that a memory stick is dead or a CD drive needs replacing, we still have to trudge through about 3 levels of "esclation" until we get to either a technically competent person or someone who speaks English well enough to send us a replacement part.

Comparing this to the older America-based call centers, we had about a 60% chance of getting some college CS major making a few extra bucks at a Dell Call Center. These people were able to realize when they were talking with someone technically competent and address the questions appropriately.

PITA

It's a major pain in the ass to deal with the Indian tech support. There are accent issues, but that is only a minor point. The real issue is the training and scripting. Typical experience (of many) I had a little while back from when I had to replace a screen and hard drive on an Inspiron. Even though I had done extensive testing ahead of time, told the tech what I had done I still had to go through 2 hours of hell before they finally acknowledged that I in fact did have failed hardware.

The scripting is bad, the fact that they can't operate outside the script is abhorrant. But what really ticks me off is when they keep trying to trick people into stating something that would void their warranty. When I had to get the LCD for the laptop replaced I was asked no less than 10 times if I had dropped the notebook. The question was varied from "did you drop it even a little bit" to "now, you said you recently dropped it, right".

The reason they got so much hell from corporate customers is that they have dedicated IT professionals who've already done all the testing and can't afford two hours on the phone to get some replacement hardware sent out. The IT dept will simply switch to a new vendor if that kind of crap persists.

Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up? The Indian support centers also pretend to be located in America, practice American accents, have sports teams they pretend to watch, and otherwise try to fool you into thinking they are in the US. All of which to get around the issue of supporting local jobs. If we farm all of our jobs out to India, who will be left to buy anything?

Re:PITA

Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up?

Oddly enough, in Dell's case most of the Indian support is full Dell (blue badge) employees. The US support is about 50% contractor temps (red badge) and about 50% blue badged full employees. Most of the temps are "converted" to full time employees after about 1 year if they prove competent, if not they are washed out.

A call to the next gen helpdesk

Hi,

There is a new next generation all purpose call center (currently beta) working here [www-ai.ijs.si].

Support: Hello. I am XXXXX. How can I help you?
Customer: I have a problem with my notebook.
Support: Why do you say your notebook?
Customer: Because i bought it from you.
Support: Do any other reasons not come to mind?
Customer: No
Support: You are being a bit negative.
Customer: The notebook isn't working.
Support: Please go on.
Customer: Suddenly yesterday it stopped working.
Support: Please go on.
Customer: What shell i do now?
Support: Does that question interest you?
Customer: Yes!
Support: You are sure?
Customer: Very sure
Support: Please go on.
Customer: Will you replace the system?
Support: Oh, i replace the system.

Sounds like a typical hotline to me....

Regards, Martin

Support being outsourced

A company that I did support for recently moved from a shop in the US (my company) to one that is in India to 'reduce costs'. However, they have since hired more second and third level support reps in-house to maintain quality. So, they went from spending a minor amount having us do their support to spending far less, then increasing costs even higher by hiring more people at their location.

If a company is trying to save money, moving to another country isn't always the best option.

From bad to....equally bad

...the Indian technical-support representatives are difficult to communicate with because of thick accents...

...will instead be handled from call centers in Texas, Idaho and Tennessee...

Looks like they might encounter the same problems ;)

You Want Customer Service?

I ordered a motherboard on a Monday to replace a dead one. That Wednesday, I got a call from a person with a thick Indian accent, who attempted to upsell me to the retail version rather than the cheaper OEM version I'd ordered. I still didn't have a UPS tracking number by Friday, so I contacted them via their live chat.

This is classic, and unedited except to get past the lameness filter and that I've taken out the company name and my order number to protect the clueless and the obnoxious. (You get to decide which is which):

CHAT TRANSCRIPT
---------------

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
You are now chatting with 'steve'
steve: xyz.Com Welcome to xyz.Com Live Chat Support. It will be my pleasure if I can be helpful to you.

Computer Peripherals at xyz

you: Hi, I'm looking for status on order xxxx, to be shipped by UPS. I don't have a tracking number yet.

steve: Just hold on please let me check the details
steve: I have check status of your order. Your order has been authorized and scheduled for picking. Means it is in inventory for picking and then off to shipping department. In case of no delays in inventory department (Like back log or order reaches there past cut off time), your order will be processed and sent to shipping department. We would send you the tracking number as soon as your order is shipped. In case if it does not show any result, you may try to track your order from our website.

you: So what you're saying is that someday someone might get around to sending the item....

steve: As soon it would be send to the shipping department you will receive it in
steve: about to 24-48 hours

you: But you can't tell me how long it will take to get to the shipping department.

steve: It will go to the shipping department today itself

you: So I should expect the motherboard on Monday?

steve: It will be soon in your hands after 24-48 hours after it is sent to the shipping department

you: Which you said will happen today.

steve: yes

you: I'm sorry, I don't understand then why it's uncertain when the product, which I'm paying to have sent overnight, will arrive.

steve: sorry for the inconvenience that may caused to you

you: Can you help me understand what could keep the product from arriving on Monday?

steve: We regret for the inconvenience

you: Does that mean, "no?"

steve: Sorry,as we don't ship the orders on weekends you would get your order by monday

you: Did you mean to say I *won't* get the order on Monday?

steve: It would be soon shipped to you by monday

you: Okay, we're closer to a real answer. But when you say, "by Monday," do you really mean "on Monday?"

steve: Yes steve: We deeply regret for the inconvenience

you: Please don't say that again.
you: So as I understand our conversation, you expect the product to reach shipping today, be shipped on Monday, and thus I should expect receive it on Tuesday?

steve: No, it would be shipped to you on monday

you: When you say "it would be shipped to you on Monday," do you mean that UPS will pick it up from you on Monday or that it will reach me on Monday?

steve: No, it would be shipped to you on monday

you: I desperately hope you are a computer and not a person. Could you rephrase your answer in a way that actually answers my question?

steve: I am not a computer
steve: I am a person

you: I'm sorry if I offended you, but I'm having a difficult time figuring out when I should expect to receive the product. Since I'm paying to have UPS overnight it, and since you seem to know when it's being shipped, could you tell me what day it will arrive?

steve: Never mind steve: Our aim

Is it a good news?

I wonder sometimes that whole of America is undergoing "walmart-ization". Here is my theory about dell call centers (complete theory pulling out of thin air):

(1) Dell pays prevaliling wages to call center people
(2) Dell wants to cut costs, so moves to India
(3) Dell employees get shafted big time
(4) Dell ex-employees (or new kids) realize no new jobs are there
(5) They are ready to accept much lower wages
(6) Viola, Dell moves back the call center

Welcome to the walmart-ization :)

S

Slashdotters

Perhaps they should hire some Slashdotters to replace the Indians.

We:
Need Jobs...Check
Know the job...Check
Communicate effectively...Hmm
Have great grammar skills...D'oh!

Actual Transcript

Caller: You don't sound like the guy who helped me last time. Is that you, Dave? Tech (sounding like apu): Oh, you must be referring to the way I am talking now.

It's the accents not the locations...

I wouldn't mind these centers being in Indian if the people there could speak clearer English. It really isn't a location or racial thing. I get just as upset when I contact an AT&T operator who speaks with a thick southern accent which slurs words so I can't understand a damn thing they are saying.

The fact of the matter is that call support requires as a basic skill clarity of communication. If the people being hired don't have this they ought not be hired! So to me the problem is far beyond these recent experiments with India. It is a fundamental problem with the industry.

Clark - Let them do the software in India

Wesley Clark's comments from the debate [nytimes.com] last night. "Let them do the software in India; we'll do other things in this country."

my .02

Just about every company that I have been with over the past four years has at some point decided to take dev and/or support to an outsourcer in India. In every case, and I do mean every one, they end up moving the critical components of the dev cycle back to the United States.

This seems to be due to cultural and communication issues. The culture of India is one where saving face can (and notice the use of the word can here) lead to a group of unsupervised programmers to do things their way no matter what the company wants. In all of these cases, deadliness were missed due to the fact that once we got the code and saw that it would either not fit into the parameters of the overall program or it was not optimized correctly, leading to slow operation.

The other issue is one of communication. It is really easy to look racist on this one, however it cannot be ignored that if your customers cannot talk to you about what is going on, and those are not being communicated back to those that can fix it, then you have reason to have a support department to begin with. Support is not only key to customer satisfaction, which to a company like Dell is a huge thing, but it is also the front line of the war against defect and defect tracking. Properly used support and properly utilized support can make the difference in releasing a product that is alright or releasing a product that fixes your customers issues. I can guarantee that these issues were not being reported to Dell in the manner that they needed for proper and timely utilization.

This is a real hot button issue within the community right now. I would hope that we can look at this issue from the point of view of pro con and not just from the POV of them thar Injuns are taking our jobs. The former will work to the upper level muckeety mucks. The later just makes us look like every other UAW worker that ever bitched about a Honda.

My offshore experiences

In 1996 I helped setup the 1st US/Mexico call center for a large US bank, where we sent calls to Mexico for Spanish speaking customers. This worked great until the company got greedy (paying the agents about $50 a week) and started sending English calls to English speaking Mexican agents. The accents in many cases were almost non-existent, however we received a lot of complaints from our customers about their ability to provide good service. Eventually we determined the cultural differences between the US customers and Mexican agents were so great, the Mexican agents could only handle the simpler calls even with rather extensive training and reference info.

In the end most English calls went to back to American agents.

One designers experience

My company, a telecom equipment provider, has several times in the past tried to move design engineering work to companies in India. As a software architect, my experience has been:

1) The Indian contractors have excellent attitudes, are friendly, and want to do a good job. I still keep in touch with one guy who was here in the states for a few months - before he went back for his arranged marriage - picked out by his mom from a book.

2) They are excellent at following a set of predefined steps to solve a problem, but run in to real difficulty if the problem requires deviating from their memorized steps. My education professor friend tells me this has to do with how their education system works. Deviation from the presented method is discouraged.

3) The language and timezone differences are both killers. It's frustrating and unproductive for all parties involved.

My company is on its third attempt at outsourcing design work to India. The first two attempts failed and the managers responsible for the transition are no longer with the company. They had no idea what they were getting into, which is a shame, since they were both decent managers. The current attempt acknowledges the failures of the past and is to focus more narrowly on software areas we think they are capable of handling. The result of this exercise has been a long list of stable software that hasn't changed in years and rarely has a problem. This, of course, leaves everyone questioning 'why are we doing this again?'.

Yeah, but...

I live just a few miles from Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas (just north of Austin) and know many people who work there. Several people I know have been called back for call center customer support jobs. Considering they have been out of work for 6 months or more they are very pleased to be going back to work.

*BUT* they have been told these are temporary jobs and will only last until they can get call centers in (IIRC) Tennessee up and running. Seems it is a lot cheaper to live in Tennesee than in the Austin area so they can pay less. These folks are facing the choice of being unemployeed again or moving to Tennessee at a lower hourly rate.

The race to the bottom for technical salaries has not slowed a bit. Dell just found that there are other factors that affect the total cost.

Stonewolf

Quality?

...companies recognize that the quality offered...

We're in the PC hardware business. What is this "quality" you speak of?

Dell rolled the dice with shareholder's money

The basic problem here:

Dell didn't properly handle a pilot project to asssess what would happen when they moved operations to India. When the Dell management invested other people's money this way, they should really have understood the risks/benefits involved up-front.

This is yet another example of quality problems on the part of Dell. I own a Dell-it has been rebuilt-3 times in 3 years(I'm glad I got the warrenty!).

Major changes in business practices are risky. The software business is one where 200-1 productivity differences in organizations aren't uncommon. It is short-sighted to disassemble the highly productive software organizations-or to cast off highly productive workforces-whereever they might be. The pool of folks with 150+ IQ's in the world just isn't that large and may not be growing despite a world population boom--and the pool of such people inclined to do technical work is another issue. The productivity differences simply swamp any cost of living differences. If we have organizations that are ceasing to be optimally productive-they need to look at their business practices.

My own guess here, McManagers with McMBA's are a major part of the problem. The Dotcon era attracted a lot of slick operators that understood money well-but didn't understand much else and offshoring is a last desperate attempt on the part of these guys to avoid the chickens inevitably coming home to roost.

Re:Mixed Feelings

In this country, even the clearest mildest foreign accent elicits reactions of "he doesn't even speek English."

My college roommate was from Sri Lanka. At one point, she called relatives in California, collect. Just getting the phone number verified was an extensive process, involving much repeating on her part.

After the conversation, she asked me if I thought her accent was really that bad. No, I explained, the problem was, she was in Oklahoma, and she was speaking far too *clearly*.

Moving Back

I work for a company that moved back.
(I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer, though.)

This happened a few times:
*ring ring*
Us: Hello [company] tech support.
India: Hello, yes? Your application is down.
Us: REALLY? *checks monitor* Everything seems normal.
India: Well, it's not responding.
Us: Hmm.. *typing* No. It's up. What exactly is the problem?
India: We just can't connect.
Us: Uh.. try google.
India: Yeah. Google's down, too.
Us: *SIGH* Your internet connection is down, AGAIN.
India: Ok, can you fix it?
Us: No. It's your problem. Call your ISP (just like last time).

Sad..

S

American Express

I don't know about Dell, as I've never had to deal with their customer support. Whenever I've called American Express, however, I've found that the many customer support people who had very slight Indian accents were extremely curteous and helpful. On the other hand, I've spoken to some women with Southern accents who were real bitches. I'm just saying you can't generalize.

Overseas call centers are a BAD IDEA!

When I worked for a certain Satellite TV Company that I will not name, they opened a call center in the philippines. I couldn't tell you how many customers that I talked to who hung up on the agents who could barely speak english and called back only to get me and bitch about it.

"Where in the fuck are you people getting employees who can't speak English?!?!"

We were not permitted to tell them that one of our call centers was overseas.

So instead of saving costs, they were incurring costs because instead of having one incoming call to handle, they had two.

Differences in dialect between different parts of one country are often hard enough to deal with. How can someone who learned english is a 2nd or 3rd language be expected to understand the idioms your customers are going to use and nuances that are a part of their speaking patters?

LK

sales

It's interesting that Dell attempted to move it's support center to India, but never attempted to move it's phone sales away from agents in Texas.

To gauge how the customer really feels about this, try doing that for just a quarter. I guarantee that you'll get a crystal clear picture of the impression that makes.

I know how our company can save $750k /yr!

You mean we're gonna call off offshoring CEO positions? Damn.