The Hidden Cost of Outsourcing 275
Alien54 writes to tell us CNNMoney is reporting that outsourcing may not be as big of a bargain as some might think. From the article: "With consumers enjoying more choice than ever before, evidence is growing that great service is essential for long-term customer retention. To cite just one example, a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service."
Slightly OT (Score:3, Informative)
To me this is a remarkable indicator of the high cluelessness level of a very large number of businesses. This is such a basic truth, it's like "Please open mouth to breathe".
Happy Customers/Happy Employees can make a successful business even if the product is just 'adequate'. People resist change more when they are happy than not. F---ing duh.
Some companies are already ahead of the game (Score:4, Informative)
From the article, "you'll soon figure out that competing solely on price is a fool's game"
Quote below taken from DNUK's website [dnuk.com]
Re:Dollar is king (Score:5, Informative)
India is a great place for development,as they have very skilled programmers for cheap wages and "tech speak" has less problems with the language barriers than customer service.
Re:Dollar is king (Score:2, Informative)
everything we've outsourced to india has been slower to develop, buggier, and come with more absolute incomprehensibility of design than anything I've ever seen.
The tech centers we've got over there are so slow as to require us to go back and do the work we would have done anyway, but now two weeks late, plus we have to clean up the mess that was left before. the "skills" we see come out of that area tend to be the skills of someone who spent years reading tech manuals and has no idea what to do when the get in front of an actual system.
Outsourcing has other benefits for companies (Score:4, Informative)
I recently found out that the following policy has been instituted. If an employee gets an offer from another company at a much higher salary, make no attempt to match the salary, just let him/her go. Hire someone else, if necessary at the higher salary. But do not give a big raise to any existing employee!
Unfortunately, this situation seems to be more and more prevalent, my friends who work in other companies have reported similar policies being instituted. I don't know where all this is going to end up.
Magnus.
Yeah, yeah, raising the bar. (Score:4, Informative)
#2 and #3 are flawed. In practice, #2 is often false or provided by sabotage. As a salesman you really have no control of #3 and may be as duped as your customers.
Cingular's "Raising the bar" is a great example. Instead of building out their network, they are spending money on exclusive phone deals and billboards. The purpose of those billboards is to expect a fictional level of service and simply say, without proof, that theirs is better. Having had Cingular and Sprint, I can say their promise is bogus where I live and I enjoy better service than Verizon and other incumbent subscribing friends do. "Education" has to be built on fact.
Re:Your logic is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
So what you're saying is that your local shop sucks, and the only way they'll fix anything is if you embarass them in front of other customers? Have you considered another shop?
Re:Broken Connection (Score:3, Informative)
However, there are a few differences. First, Tier I didn't have to get Tier II's permission to escallate; at most, a new tech might have to check with his lead. They simply transfer the call to the Tier II queue and go on with their next call. Second, if you asked for a supervisor, you got one; probably the team lead for that tech's team. One of the things they were paid for was dealing with angry callers.
One of the things not mentioned is that sometimes a senior tech will question you about what's been done not because they don't trust the other tech, but because the tech didn't take proper notes. You're not going to get much info if the notes read, "I spent 15 minutes trying to fix his connection then sent to Tier II."
Last, every customer service/tech support center is going to be judging their workers on average call time and number of calls per day, simply because there are very few objective measures of how well they're doing. If you don't close a ticket until you're sure the issue's finished, you can see how mny tickets get closed on the first call, but at one point, we were told to create a new ticket for each call and close it regardless. Not only did it void the "first call" metric, it made it harder to familiarize yourself with the issue's history. Techs do the work at those call centers, but the people deciding how they'll do it generally are MBA's with neither technical experience nor the desire to understand the work.
Re:12 of the many problems with outsourcing to Ind (Score:3, Informative)
2)OJ Simpson Anyone?
3)Indians can innovate. What do you call creating a business model where most of your work comes from a high living cost country so you can charge high rates but you do it in a low living cost country so your costs are lower. Thats real innovative
4)And the point is? Decisions made by an American programmer are different from decisions made by an Indian programmer How?
5) Yes the reason is most of the wealth of India was looted over 3 centuries of colonialism but then again the Indians are getting rich again. There was a time when 4 centuries back when 80% of world GDP was Indian and Chinese and we are going back to the same. Yes of course it affects how people work. When people have had to struggle to get into a well paying career they take their job seriously unlike somebody in the US who has had the job handed to him on a platter
6) Yes their is an overhead in crossing cultural boundaries. That is why companies offer lower rates so it is worth taking the trouble to cross those boundaries
7) Nobody in their right mind outsources critical areas oly non core competencies
8) If your attitude is managers suck no wonder they want to outsource your job. Whether you like it or not the world is set up where people with soft skills rule people with technical skills. Just face the facts. If you dont like it you should have spent more time at frat parties in college to develop the soft skills needed for management
9) The reason people need to outsource is that the US has an unsustainably high standard of living. When a plumber or Garbage truck driver in the US earns more than a rocket scientist in other countries somewhere the extra amount of money has to be brought in. If Engineers and IT people want the same benefits of being American that Garbage truck drivers and Dockworkers have then they too should put time and effort into forming unions. If not dont blame management for trying to balance the books through outsourcing. You want a really fair system make it so that anyone from the poorest country can come to the US and do the low end jobs. Soon the cost of living will be low enough in the US to be able to compete on salaries with any other country. Or be like the Doctors and Lawyers who use the law from preventing foreign competition.
10) Thats so freaking wrong. A Puritan culture which is bascially what the Americans started out with respects authority a lot more but that doesnt prevent individualistic expressions in the US
11) Well its true Hindus have made bad decisions in the past which allowed their country to be overrun by Muslim and Christian rulers but that doesnt mean they are self defeating. People make bad decisions. The key is to learn from the mistakes. The Native Americans made a bad mistake by not killing every white colonist on sight and they got overrun as a result. Hindus did the same mistake with Muslims and Britishers but they learnt enough in time to survive so I would say they have learnt their lesson
12) OK Companies fail for a variety of reasons . Blaming outsourcing is just a red herring unless you have specific proof of outsourcing leading to the failure
13) OK the caste systems been dead for a while. When I went through school the only place people were asked about their castes was for reservations( India's version of affirmative action for the erstwhile lower castes) . I had friends from all castes and caste was never an issue in our dealings ( In fact I didnt know their castes till we started filling forms for college admission. Man was I pissed that I was a so called upper caste and could not apply for affirmative action). Granted I grew up in a city so their might still be some vestiges of the caste system left in the really isolated villages. Its kind of like the Hillbillys . You know they exist in your country, You wish they were not so backward, you are embarressed by their presence but theres precious little you can do if some people insist on being stupid. In any case anyone who wants to be successfull in today's India better not be casteist.
perspectives from a US call center worker (Score:2, Informative)
1) Many Americans have come to believe that buying something or subscribing to a product is tantamount to an agreement in which the provider becomes the slave of the consumer. Therefore any inconvenience is insufferable. Dare to question the consumer or suggest an action they might take? Unacceptable. The only solution is to press the immediate "fix it" button, after which you should apologize for having wasted the consumer's (presumably) valuable time. People tend to believe their material success actually makes them superior. (You would be surprised how little wealth it takes to give people this confidence)
2) Many Americans have had very little exposure to any accent other than their own, much less ever tried to learn a 2nd language. I have had people transferred to me from other extremely capable reps simply because they could not understand the other rep's accent. "I just don't think they should hire those foreigners, i just can't understand a word they say." or even better, "You people don't need to hire someone who doesn't understand English." Of course they come off sounding incredibly ignorant and childish, but welcome to the planet. Of course, not everyone is that rude about it. I have friends (mostly older friends) who I love to death, and who are great people, but they just can't understand foreign accents.
3) Like many other /.ers, people within a certain radius of me ask me to fix their computers. I have tried to help close friends over the phone with their computer problems. Half the time I know exactly what the problem is and have a clear image of their computer in my mind. Most of the time I end up having to fix the problem in person. If someone is having so much of a problem with their pre-configured dell that they have to call tech support, they probably aren't going to understand what the person is telling them to do. (That having been said, I have heard of some incompetant computer support reps; my friend had an Acer rep tell her that the power cord was the reason her laptop was freezing up, and they sent her a new one.)
most people can barely handle telephone support from their countrymen. Even if the rep speaking from India does a flawless job, sometimes the American consumer just can't handle it. randyjg2's comment above was a great example of that. Anyway there's my $0.02.
Comments on your Dell problems article (Score:3, Informative)
Windows is no Linux, even with a sizeable collection of free utilities, but you can at least make it palatable.
Use filemon [sysinternals.com] to find the offending process.
My second Dell issue concerns the USB ports. 5 USB 2 ports on the back and 2 on the front, and I normally use most of them -- (1) USB hub for wireless keyboard, (2) USB mouse, (3) USB wireless LAN, (4) USB 3-speakers system, (5) external USB DVD+RW drive (as Dell wanted too much for the internal one, so I went for internal DVD-ROM), and (6) USB hard drive.
You may be simply drawing too much power. Try purchasing an inexpensive *powered* USB hub. Plug that into the computer and plug some of the devices into it (as a bonus, this provides a rather more conveniently locatable thing to plug things into).
The problem is that hard drive failure is so serious an issue that operating systems will understandably make it priority number one and other programs/operations will suffer performance problems or worse (or even worse).
It's not the priority, but the fact that things like the pagefile being on the hard drive and executable code being on the hard drive causes some operations (like memory accesses or simply trying to execute a chunk of code) to take incredibly long.
Computers normally do a good job of faking "multi tasking" but NMI (non-maskable interrupts) rain on that parade.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that a media read error will produce an NMI.