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Offshore This!
By Rick David, Wed Dec 7th
So I call my telephone company and someone picks up 15,000 milesaway. I asked the rep where she's from. She said, “I am fromMary-Land sir. How may I give you excellent service today?” Theaccent was… American... in a high society 19th centuryultra-polite sort of way. “Mary Land?” My brain's editing booth could not screen thesnickers in time. “Yes sir… this is correct sir.” She pushed to the next level.“Yes, Mary Land, sir, on thee eastern seaboard. How may I giveyou excellent service?” (Article continued below)
“The eastern seaboard?” Now laughing out loud. “Yes sir, on thee eastern seaboard of thee United States. May Igive you excellent service today?” The ‘broken record’ assertiveness technique broke my resolve andshe proceeded to give me excellent service, in a deceptive kindof way, though the experience left me queasy thinking about thewhole new class of jobs being shipped overseas. When manufacturing left the United States, the tech sector wassupposed to be the new frontier. Americans rushed out to beretrained. Students set their sites on computer engineering. Ourtech sector was so good, it created the very systems that madeit possible to replace itself. Corporations discovered that anIndian college graduate will work at a call center for 10,000rupees a month, or just under $60.00 a week. I have no malicefor our Indian friends, they only want to work. But our kids aregoing to have to become proficient at more than playing videogames and watching movies to compete with this highly educatedand driven mass of hungry labor! Math anyone? I remember hearing that the receptionist was the "face andvoice" of the company and the public would get their first andmost lasting impression based on her attitude. (With that muchon her shoulders, they should have raised her pay.) Now thewhole customer interface has been tossed to foreign nationals.Perhaps there will be a backlash in advertising. "Our techsupport is Made in the USA! If the anecdotal evidence onInternet posting boards is any measure, many customers wouldrather be pierced with punji sticks rather than be taught oneforeign language, (the computer) by someone with another foreignlanguage! Written scripts are repeated ad nauseum with noability to converse off-road and actually make the customer feelunderstood. Below is a sample, your results may vary. Reactions to Foreign Customer Service “I called HP Cares. They didn't. I spoke with three or fourrepresentatives. They all had limited English and spoke with anaccent. They all asked me the same set of questions. Many askedthe same questions over and over and over again. They allrefused to believe that the sticker was not there. They alltreated me like I was simply too stupid to find it or maybe Iwas just blind. And, they all put me on hold…” “We could not understand each other. Even the simplest Englishterms were incomprehensible to her. I said goodbye and wentthrough the tedious re-calling process, waiting another 20minutes or so on hold. The second technician could also notunderstand English, and the connection broke after a fewminutes, so I called a third time, going through the wholewaiting drill…” “I will never purchase another Dell product, ever again. Andeveryone I know will not purchase their products either…” It appears that companies may also be outsourcing the trustthey've built in their brand, along with customer loyalty andretention. I think I'm on to something here. Let's go Americanbusiness! Advertise your "Onshore" Calling Center!!! The call centers are not only in India, they are coming onlineanywhere a building can put up some computers, chairs and getbroadband. A Costa Rican tech support rep working for Toshibacomplained in a posting that his job was outsourced to Turkey.Kencall of Kenya, provides its own generators and satelliteuplink. I bet they don't have an employee snack room though. Foreign Outsourcing vs. Offshoring "Foreign Outsourcing" is the hiring of a foreign company to dosome of your work, while "Offshoring" is the creation of awholly owned foreign subsidiary which gives the company greatercontrol. According to the financial consulting firm Deloitte andTouche, there was a 38% increase in the number of financialinstitutions with offshore operations in 2003, with an estimated500% increase in offshore jobs. Call center work is only the tip of the iceberg. There is anever expanding list of higher level technical positions beingexported from a variety of industries. Engineering positions,architectural design work, computer programmers,computer-generated animation, financial and legal research,insurance claim processing, software coding, AutoCAD, technicaldrawings and billions of dollars worth of back office servicesare now being moved from the first world to the third world bymostly the larger companies. This is making it difficult formedium sized businesses to compete. India is well positioned to receive much of this work because ithas a large English speaking population from its colonialhistory with Great Britain, and a growing pool of Internet-wisegraduates ready to work at low Indian wages. Concerns over data privacy and data theft loom large. Threeemployees of Msource in India allegedly siphoned off $350,000from Citibank customers recently, using information obtainedover the phone, according to Callcentres.net. The plaintiffs whowill go through a living hell trying to gain back theirfinancial identities will not be outsourced, nor will the localjudges and jury who will hear the case. A couple other factorsthat come to mind when considering foreign outsourcing oroff-shoring, are Islamic terrorists hostile to westerninterests, civil unrest, security costs, infrastructure concernsand the global war on terrorism...just off the top of my head. Growing up we were told to eat all of our food because peoplewere starving in other countries. I remember being chastised forsuggesting that we should ship out my left over peas andcarrots. Today we should tell our kids to study hard and thinkoutside the box because people in other countries are hungry fortheir jobs! Let's Laugh and Have Faith On a lighter note, my wife called our credit card company andwas transferred to “Mumbai”. (Bombay) In one minute she wassquaring off with the mores of a patriarchal society. She wastold that she would have to “consult with her husband and obtainhis permission and consent, and gain his approval.” The policy was no doubt born in America, but something in thetone and wording communicated female inferiority and wifelysubservience. The idea of being "granted approval" was not goingdown easy. There may have been some gagging. “BUT...IF, my husband doesn’t pay his bill, THEN you’ll want totalk to me! Will I need his "approval" and "consent" and"permission" for MY credit to be hammered?" I was handed the phone at a certain mid-point in theintercontinental shoving match. Something about “your husbandwill have to make that decision”. I got on the phone and had a lovely conversation. We marveled athow all of this can be taking place over thousands of miles.Actually I rather enjoyed the experience. Perhaps I canoutsource our marriage counselor. About the author:Rick David writes for a Merchant Newsletter @ MerchantAmerica. He also writes a humor column called, "Don't Laugh It Could Happen ToYou" for http://sandiego.merchantamerica.com. | 