Overseas phone support, what is the real problem?

[otakuneko]

Foamy says "keep the jobs in the US, so I can understand who I'm talking to."

And remember folks, outsourcing does not necessarily == offshoring. Verizon, for example, does absolutely none of its DSL (FIOS is a different matter) support in-house. Pretty much all of it was outsourced to my former employer. Most FIOS support is actually in-house, but a good chunk of it is outsourced to my former employer's callcenter right here in DFW.

Oh, and we did have plenty of Indians, and other people from that region of the world.

[freeatlast]

My problems with overseas support are twofold...The first and primary one is purely the outsourcing of jobs from the USA, which I'm hoping is self-explanitory

I was downsized from the Call Center From Hell because of outsourcing. They had another wave of downsizing in June and at the end of 2008 they closed the department I worked in. ALL calls are now outsourced. When I worked there, I took escalated calls. At least 80% of the calls transferred to me were from the outsourcing agents. Most of the time, they transferred because they did not want to try to figure out how to help the customers. Most of the time, the reason they gave for the transfer had nothing to do with the reason the customer was calling. We were instructed to do write ups for upper management regarding these transfers. It was a waste of time because they would not take any action.

Quite often, the outsourcing agent would lie about the transfer. For instance, they would say that the customer requested a supervisor because of the language/accent barrier. Once I would speak to the customer, I would find that as soon as the customer asked a question, the outsourcing agent would tell them that they could not help them and would need to transfer to a supervisor.

It was common knowledge that they were not upheld to the same quality standards as the agents in our own call center. It was cheaper to have the calls routed to them and know amount of complaints about the quality of their calls or the unneeded transfers meant anything to upper management. It was all about the $$.

At this point, the few remaining people who still work there (in other departments) are just waiting for the ax to fall. They know their days are numbered and the main reasons that the business is failing are the outsourcing of customer service and their complete lack of acknowledgement of their bad debt situation, which is another post in itself.

[Slytovhand]

Do the agents (who know the axe is coming) act like it to the callers? After all, what do they have to lose? Do they tell the customers why their call quality has plummetted due to lack of interest from management?

[freeatlast]

The only phone agents left are the outsourcing agents. They are unaware that complaints have been made regarding their lack of quality. The only people left (those who are waiting for the ax to fall) are people in other departments than customer service. The remaining departments have no contact with the customers.

[Gerrinson]

From a customer standpoint, I can attest to the fact that there are some really good outsourced agents and some really bad outsourced agents, just like people everywhere. The problem, especially with American customers, is that when you take a mediocre agent (not superb, but not bad, either) and toss in language barrier you wind up reducing the quality of the overall service provided.

And forcing them to be scripted - I hated scripts when I worked in a call center. I hate them 10x more as a customer. If I could round up all the corporate retards responsible for approving these scripts - and, honestly, do they actually READ the verdammt things - I would shoot them all and know I had done the world a favor. I don't want to hear my own name 500x, I don't care if you're 'sorry' about the inconvenience - just fix my damned problem!

What I hate worse than outsourced phone agents are outsourced email respondents. They don't actually READ the emails, they scan for keywords, do a d-base search, then cut & paste whatever top response the d-base spits out. And they do that to each of your replies until finally the 5th or 6th email gets into the hands of someone who can actually comprehend what you wrote.

On several occasions, I've simply cut all ties with companies simply because their customer 'service' was designed to be customer 'disservice' due to outsourcing to cheap but low quality agencies.

Again, I think it boils down to the language/cultural differences making what would normally be an average or slightly sub-par experience and reducing the quality to the point that customers can't stand it.

On the flip side, the Indian support team that I worked with at GE was far more qualified and helpful than anyone I worked with in the US. I nearly broke down and cried when I heard their contract was cancelled.

[PepperElf]

My biggest issue is ... just communications.

The first time I ever had to call HP for help on my old computer... I got an outsourced tech.

It wouldn't have mattered, but... all she did was gather information without even attempting to make sure it was right. I don't remember if I spelled out my last name for her or not... I usually do because it's Polish.

What I do remember is that when she sent me to the next tech (with an American accent) the poor lady had to basically re-do everything the outsourced tech had done because she got it all wrong. My name, my street name, even my computer model number.

She might as well have just let a cat walk across the keyboard for all of her "accuracy".


So, in cases like that, outsourcing can actually waste money, because the Full-pay tech has an even longer job if she or he has to re-do everything the outsource-pay tech did.

"Paying two people to do one person's job" does not strike me as a winning motto for a successful company.

[tropicsgoddess]

I've never been a fan of overseas support to begin with.

1. Less jobs for us here in the U.S.
2. 2. Miscommunications
3. 3. (more often than not) Crappy Customer Service

[PepperElf]

ironically in one of my computer classes we went over some terminology related to this.

according to the textbook

Out-sourcing = sending work to another company
Off-shoring = sending work to another country

though yeah even he knows we tend to use "outsourcing" for sending work to other countries
back to the original post

[Fire_on_High]

My biggest issue is ... just communications.

The first time I ever had to call HP for help on my old computer... I got an outsourced tech.

It wouldn't have mattered, but... all she did was gather information without even attempting to make sure it was right. I don't remember if I spelled out my last name for her or not... I usually do because it's Polish.

What I do remember is that when she sent me to the next tech (with an American accent) the poor lady had to basically re-do everything the outsourced tech had done because she got it all wrong. My name, my street name, even my computer model number.

That was my experience with HP when a Pavilion Elite I got as a gift had recurrent video card issues. I gave them an email address I don't frequently use, since my normal one was down at the time due to a server move. The first part of it rhymed somewhat with my surname, but was actually unrelated.

Well...the first tech completely bungled the name and it shipped with a male Hispanic first name sounding a bit like mine and the email addy as my last name. I got the part, but boy am I glad there was no issue with shipping...I couldn't have done squat about it legally. I did call between notification and when it shipped to try and get it corrected, but to not avail.

Same part died again about a month later, and the American tech managed to fix the name issue, but insisted on some rather annoying troubleshooting by script. I'd already done the work...intermittent fan failure after use under load which sent the temp skyrocketing to 115c. Very straightforward, and Everest + listening to when it stopped grinding and rattling offered unmistakeable evidence.

The next replacement was one step shy of totally DOA. Back to an Indian tech this time, and he was *incredibly* stubborn and willing to simply dig his heels in and holler til I knuckled under and did what he wanted. Normally I could understand the desire to perform diagnostics, but when the machine was consistently locking up 10 seconds after booting, or dissolving into a lovely test pattern-y blur as early as the HP splash screen, how about...that thing ain't going back in? No, no, and hell no...

What part of "does not boot, generally" and "locks up immediately when it does" isn't clear? But I didn't get sucky...just very, very firm. He did realize how much chance there was of creating further issues and went thru the diags on my old card while the fan was working to fill out the form.

I know the script is there for a reason but mindlessly attempting to follow it on equipment too screwed up to work is a waste of everyone's time. The intensive diagostic apps were all inside Windows...on a machine that wouldn't boot without locking up. Hello?

To this day I'm morbidly curious what he would have done if I'd said it caught fire on me.