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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?"
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?
Trolling is a art,
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.
Here's a great article originally in the Hindustan Times 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 by David Sedaris.
... I was hoping this would happen, preferably to a major company with lots at stake. It was a bad idea from the outset, and I sincerely pray that it ripples all throughout the industry.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
that nobody in my company has to read the CODE that EDS & IBMs Indians will soon be writing for us. That might just save my job.
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.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
No!
Next stupid question please.
That was classic intercourse!
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.
...in bed
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.
I think Dell would greatly benefit from the resourcefulness of the Open Source developer community. Their attention to detail, cost-effectiveness, and pleasant speaking manner would be the key for Dell to transcend its shackles of corporate mediocrity and raise like a Phoenix, and overtake IBM as the leading hardware manufacturer state-side.
Studies have proven time and time again, that consumers want to have well-researched answers to their problems and wish to do away with the immediate gratification of having their problems addressed right away. By allowing the Open Source developers discuss Dell client's issue publicly in a forum, an ideal solution will be found every time. The consumer will be able to appreciate the horizons that open before him as they install Debian or Gimp for their home office.
Only when we clear the backlog of H1 Visas can be adequately address the shortage of labor in our nation, especially for lawyers and politicians.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
I for one welcome _back_ our call center overlords!
Now when I call to get support for my laptop I can't swap receipies and get those authentic spicy Indian dishes!
On the bright side, I won't have to think Apu offering me a squishy while I'm asking them to repeat theirselves for the 8th time.
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 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.
It gets me so annoyed whenever we call Cisco now and get someone who doesn't understand anything I am saying. It is Verbal and Non-Verbal for the most part too.
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!
after an onslaught of complaints from dissatisfied customers who couldn't cope with the differing accents and scripted responses.
Sounds like most call centers in the US!
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/7345 841.htm
"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."
This won't matter when AI technology comes of age. Then you can talk to a computer and it should help you out. India would be outsourced to AI.
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.
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?
Is this the end of a trend in which Slashdot submitters conclude with a supposedly pithy question that is indecipherable/meaningless?
I wish.
1. The quality offered doesn't result in better quality? Huh?
2. I doubt companies were ever under the impression that moving call centers overseas would result in greater "customer appreciation." They were hoping for "customer tolerance."
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.
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."
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
From the article:
In afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Dell was up 67 cents at $35.19.
There are social movements 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.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
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.
Dell is notorious for utterly worthless tech support. If you don't have standards, your location is irrelevant.
I guess the question I have is, if all these tech companies move all their operations over seas, who in the US will be left working, and want their technology? Really rich people don't need it and poor people can't afford it, and the middle class wont exist if we outsource all of our stuff overseas. This 'stuff' consists of programming jobs, call centers, medical transcription, hardware manufacturing, car manufacturing, etc. In the end we wont have a middle class in the US so who will need this crap anyway?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Birdy num nums?
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?
Nope.
You mention Phoenix (of hated TCPA BIOS fame), Dell vs. IBM, Gimp (of Gimp v. Photoshop) and Debian (of Debian v. RedHat, and indirectly RMS and Perens).
You can't opensource a thing. What's next, Open Source supermarkets? OpenSource car mechanics?
Maybe you mean that there should be a non-vendor Help Desk that you could call, THAT actually might work. But otherwise, +1, Troll!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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: multiplayer, head to head, and free
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
I wish that the people of the U.S. has a greater awareness of how badly exporting jobs hurts our economy and unemployment rate.
We need to make a stand to these companies and demand that "Made in USA" tag!
Open up the H1-B program to customer service representatives.
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...
Corporatism != Free Market
My favorite is calling directory assistance for a town and the person doesn't know the names of the major roads.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
...who couldn't cope with the differing accents and scripted responses.
Different accents this might help. The scripted responses are a staple of every call center, so good luck with that.
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).
Seriously the accents are a bit much when trying to relay a technical problem and having to repeat everything three times.
...I guess Dell thinks thick accents and scripted responses won't hurt the home customer's experience. I guess it's been said, they go where the money is, and corporations who stop buying computers can hurt...home users just don't matter. Thanks Dell.
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?
I would think that the home consumers would be the ones most impacted by the offshore callcenters... why move back the corporate calls but not the home users? At my company I deal with Dell all the time and get someone in India for about 60 - 70% of my calls. I usually have no problem getting what I need because I know what I'm talking about. However, the home users I support who on occasion deal with Dell are not as savvy, and they are constantly complaining to me about the horrid support they get from the offshore callcenters... I would think that Dell would be getting far more complaints from their home users than from the corporate folks who know what they're doing! This is a strange strategy, you'd think they'd make more people happy by leaving the business unit overseas and moving the home support back to the States...
"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.
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
In Soviet Russia we welcome the death of these tired old jokes.
i'm glad to hear it. I used to work in a tech center a few years back and one thing our company was complemented on was the fact that we were easly understood aside from the usuall call centers such as the previous dell center where the techs may speak good english but the accenct is just to different to comprehend. the last thing most of these people want to deal with after having endless computer problems is a person they can't understand, especially when the topic is most likley too technical to be able to figure out what it was they were saying.
uidzer0.org
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.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
a leading Indian Business daily newspaper The Econmictimes has an article that quotes a dell spokesman as having said "Dell has no plans to scale back resources at the Bangalore call center or change employment plans in the United States, although he would not comment on specifics."
According to that commercial where the interns accidentally shut off the lights during one of their zany misadvantures, Dell's call centers are in the USA. I knew I couldn't trust those interns!
You mean we're gonna call off offshoring CEO positions? Damn.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
doing the "grunt" work on the other side can be very frustrating and impede progress.
:)
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
Customer: "My PC won't turn on." Open Source Guy: "Did you read the FAQ???????? RTFM YOU TARD."
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.
Please help metamoderate.
Is it me or are a number of those examples perfectly acceptable english?
Who doesn't know that "Can I have the Bill" means that you wish to pay for what you ate?
"Can you give me a jump?" -- Again, it seems obvious what is meant.
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.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/7345 841.htm
"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."
No Michael Dell is just smarter than most CEO's. I think we'll realize Middle East peace and wormhole travel before the rest of corporate America catches on!
Has there ever been any serious attempts at creating a "special ops" team of IT professionals for hire?
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.
do() || do_not();
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.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
Why should I listen to them? They also reported that "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple..." and "JFK posthumously joins Republican Party...", then tried to sue themselves to retract the statements!
Who doesn't know that "Can I have the Bill" means that you wish to pay for what you ate?
That strongly depends on which accent is used by the person saying "Can I have the Bill"... Some accents are so strong that it requires quite some decoding to figure out what was said.
I was averaging an hour and a half to two hours on the phone with Dell to get replacement parts for computers covered under warranty. I check out the computer thoroughly before calling them so I know what the problem is, but they still insist on going through an obscenely long script, putting me on hold, etc.
Me: "Look, when I start the computer, the hard drive makes a loud banging noise and won't boot from the hd. Hear that? That's it banging."
Them: "Okay. I want you to boot up Windows2000, then look on the back of the tower and tell me the pattern of the little green lights..."
Companies may be able to successfully outsource coding, etc., but any job that requires heavy interaction with people should stay States-side.
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?
I work for a large western-state school district and we've been purchasing all of our systems from Dell for a while now. My personal experience with their Indian tech help is that, yes, they are very friendly and attempt to be helpful - but even if their accent is not too thick for me to understand (or to be fair, mine for them to understand) our speech patterns are very different which caused all kinds of problems. By this I mean odd things like they never knew if I'd finished a sentence, and expressions I'd never considered idiomatic of American English totally confused them. Honestly, I often had far less frustrating experiences with thickly southern-accented Dell techs who had little interest in being helpful.
There is a new next generation all purpose call center (currently beta) working here.
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
I've been pulling contract jobs away from companies in India and some guy in Brazil because none of them were able to communicate effectively with one of my clients. The nice part is that I not only get more work, but my client is planning on sticking with U.S. workers from now on. The Indians cost him many thousands of dollars when they blew a deadline and he came to me for emergency service on his web app. They blew the deadline because they didn't understand some of the text in the manual for the software they were configuring. The guy in Brazil was clueless about why adhering to internet standards is important and he was failing to get the content to the end users in a format that they could use. I'm Brazilian my self (it hurts not to use an "s") but I'd rather not export U.S. jobs there, particularly if this guy is going to be making Brazilian tech workers look bad.
If you can't compete on the up front costs, compete with your computer and communication skills. If that doesn't work, remind them that your taxes pay for the U.S. to run and your spending improves the U.S. economy, while offshoring improves the economy elsewhere.
t'nera semordnilap
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.
Looks like they might encounter the same problems
Move the sales teams and upper management jobs to India too, you can save a lot of money that way. And they are just as competent, if not even more so.
I work for a major automotive company in their IT UNIX department. It's not a matter of sending support to THEM, it's THEM coming back here and taking our jobs. Out of the 6-700 employees in my building I'd estimate a good 55% are from over 'there'. Not that I'm rasist, nor do I dislike any of them (much), I dislike the fact that they're here on work permits, banking every last penny so they can move back home in 5-8 years and be equivilent of a millionare once back there.
1. The automotive company I work for is not selling any cars to them.
2. The paycheck they collect is stashed and all the money is spent back overseas.
3. They work cheaper and take US jobs.
Not to mention the language barrior I have talking with someone I've worked with for over a year. Thank you Dell. If only a small step, it's a step in the right direction.
I had to deal with Netgear support which I think was based in India. At least, all the guys on the other end had that stereotypical Indian/Pakistani accent. They seemed really knowledgeable, and they seemed to know the router very well. Their English was a bit difficult to understand at times. It was a bit annoying that every time I called there, they would take me through the same script. Unplug your router, plug it in. Restart your computer, go to 192.168.1.1, go to Wizard, click "next", etc... I had to do this every time I called. It got annoying pretty quick. I can't say whether or not American customer support technician's would be any better. One time I had some questions about my ADSL modem, and it was made by a small Canadian company. When I called customer service, I think I was talking to an engineer. He had intimate knowledge of the modem/router, and it sounded like he might have built part of it. It's too bad there are so many customers out there and there aren't enough of them to go around.
Will the support be any better now? They will probably have to employ fewer people (unless they are willing to eat some major costs to employ the same number of people). I am predicting longer hold times and no more satisfying results.
Incidentally, my mother-in-law and I were talking about this just two days ago, and she and my father-in-law decided that they will not buy any more Dells because of the support problems they had with an Indian call center.
I am a huge fan of free trade, but this is a good example of how what an exec thinks is cheaper isn't really cheaper. As another poster said, there are great things Indians do well for less money, but phone support for Dell wasn't one of them.
Boom Shanka
as a native english speaker, of the american "dialect", i would have considered any of the "odd" uses of english in the http://www.rajiv.com/india/humor/langusa.asp article as absolutely normal and understandable. I would have understood everything the Indians had said without hesitation.
I can't imagine any town or city in the U.S. were they wouldn't know what a "bill" is in the context of a meal at a resturaunt or a "ring" in the context of a getting in contact with someone. it was rediculous.
India: "Hmm. I'm sorry, I'll have to put you on hold for a specialist. One moment please."
US: "Hmm. I'm sorry, I'll have to put you on hold for a specialist. One moment please.'
Yeah, but I'm not sure what you have in mind for those cables with the big nasty clamps on them. I'm not into that kinky stuff.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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
For those of us who work for Dell and are Lat/Opti support this is great news.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You get some twit from the Philippines who I'm trying to diagnose a router problem. For some reason it's not routing properly. I tell him, yes I've done routing for a couple of years now. No, it's not the damn computer, okay here, I've configured a static routing table.
"What's that? You're a CCNA? (something I had told him to try and prove my bonifides (never mind that I've been routing for 2 years)) Wow... I've been taking classes for a couple of years now hoping to get that!"
Arrrgh, it took me over 3 hours and 2 phone calls to finally have them tell me that oooops! Your product doesn't do what you're asking about.
And moving parts of it back to this side of the globe isn't going to change that. They are stingy with their parts, they are slow to diagnose problems, they only replace problem machines when the damn things catch fire, and if you are (un)fortunate enough to have a same day onsite contract, the joker they send you has an A+ certification from Bob's School of Worthless Certifications, and is far more likely to make the problem worse.
Best case scenario is the tech they send will make the machine catch fire, and they'll send you a new one, and the cycle can start over.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I personally feel that US companies were simply scrambling to cut costs by outsourcing over the past few years, and many probably overcompensated. Now that the economy is improving, people will not only be able to take the time to see that outsourcing overseas is not always the best thing for IT, and that they also can add value by providing someone with expertise who can relate to the people they are working with.
The upshot being that the outsourcing trend will slow and the IT market will begin to pick up again. This is good news for people who need a job or are looking for a new one.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Can be a bit of a nightmare when someone in the US is supposed to be running the operation that is doing the work in India, and picking up the slack of work not being done, or being done improperly. With all the back and forth, people are starting to see that it is just easier to have it done properly the first time. Finding truly good people in India appears to be quite difficult at the moment. The really good ones work in the US, so the cream is gone. Of the chaff.... it seems to be hit or miss. Not to mention problems of just getting the people to show up every day; I have heard stories of guys working for 2 weeks, and then taking a month vacation for some family function of some sort or another (wedding usually)!
Dell's lost already. I ordered a Dell laptop and Printer once. The printer came without a power supply and power cable. After 6 calls to India (two disconnects), I received two USB cables to hook the printer to the computer. 4 more calls and an hour later, I at least got someone from Texas. A 30 minute description later, I got a power cable sent out.
Thank sweet Jesus the car industry can't outsource service for broken cars to Mexico or India. Could you imagine? Dell is still not supporting the end user and has the majority of their jobs out of the country. Dell sucks and I will never buy their products again. Nor will the company I work for.
No sig here.
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
Just as a side note, on the recent "This American Life" compilation CD there is a track of David Sedaris himself retelling that story. Check it out at http://www.thislife.org/
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
My company put a call center in the Pillipines this year. I admire the work ethic and the dedication of the people down there. However, it takes twice as long to communicate and resolve computer related issues. I wonder if we're really saving money?
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
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!
Today, Latitude support, "Arn" (?!) from India ordered me a new LCD for a laptop. Guess this takes time to switch back to the US.
NGC
EJ
As a Dell customer, I have recently experienced many problems with Dell's tech support. One of my end users recently went through a major fiasco with Dell tech support, attempting to replace a hard drive. It took an hour and a half on the phone before the guys in India would finally agree to send a new hard drive to the end user. Mind you, we pay for next business day onsite service, so sending a replacement drive without a tech to install it was unacceptable. The user finally convinced the guys on the other end to send a tech, too. It only took three business days for the tech to show up, and we still don't know why. The tech worked for another outsourcer (NCR), and their call center also appears to have been in India.
At any rate, I gave my Dell salesreps an earful about the awful tech support and service, and by the time our field rep came out to see us the next month, he had the good news that Dell was moving support for the Optiplex and Latitude lines back to the US. We were by far not the only customers to complain vociferously about the poor quality of Dell's tech support.
Mind you, it's not specifically the fact that the tech support had moved to India that we were complaining about: It was that you couldn't understand the people at the other end, and they were reading from scripts and had no real ability to solve problems. There's still a strong possibility that Dell's US-based tech support reps will be just as clueless as the poor drones in India. Just because I can understand them doesn't mean they're giving me better service.
In the US we stress problem solving above all else
No you don't.
Most education up to the lower levels of an undergrad degree is simply memorization.
Times tables, memorizing formulas and plugging them in.
Why do you think so many people complain about "word problems", they just don't cleanly fit the formula the person has in their head.
We test this way, we check facts, or provide a simple problem (that was answered in the textbook) then have them regurgitate it.
That being said, it isn't evil, I don't think it is very easy to teach people to relate these facts into a usable knowledge base.
Even if we could teach it, we don't test this way.
I like the irony of your sig under this post ;-)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
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.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
Umm, I don't get that first link. Was it supposed to be funny? There was nothing said that should have been misinterpreted. If someone in a parking lot asked me "for a jump," I would know exactly what there were talking about. In fact, that's probably the exact phrase I would expect to hear from someone. Same thing if someone was to tell me they would "give me a ring tomorrow." What's hard about that? I've probably said that myself. And I live in 'the South' which is pretty notorious for is horrendous butchering of the English language (as evident by my post, perhaps.)
Also, I don't get the whole "two ten / tooting" reference. Why was she saying tooting when asked her address?
As a former Dell Employee and Manager of HSB Technical support I can tell you that Dell could care less about customer service. The only thing that Dell cares about is profit margin, in this case the "noise" is loud enough to threaten the profit margin in the Business Enterprise and that's the only reason they are bringing Business support back to the US, it would cost more in the long run not to.
Dell's non-business ventures amount to a small portion of their overall earnings, and as I said Dell really does not care about service; yes the give it lip "service" but honestly, they only see service as a revenue loss. Dell has forgotten, or chooses to ignore, that their reputation was built upon strong Customer Service and even better Technical Support, sadly those days are long gone and you would be lucky to find a tech who honestly knows how to do anything other than to read a script or run a complete system restore, what used to be known at Dell as "ZZTOP". It's common for Dell tech's to recommend a reinstall on most calls, even in cases where errors are occuring during post, which just goes to vividly illustrate thier ignorance of computer architecture and operations.
I left Dell because of the shift to GREED above SUBSTANCE as well as the shift from a family-oriented business to one soley driven by profit; Dell actually used to be a fun and enjoyable work environment, it's sad that they tossed out all those who helped to build the company to what it was, the technical support staff and those who truly cared about the customer.
Yes, I know that businesses exist to make a profit, I'm no fool and I'm only somewhat of an idealist, but at least I care about my employees and my customers.
I urge everyone to write Dell and protest the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries, act now before it's too late!
Yesterday they came for your neighbor's job, when will they come for yours?
Except for the parts that are leading the moral and social revolution when it comes to homosexual marriage rights and universal health care.
Only Americans claim Canada is irrelevant, but that's because America is so relevant that they can't understand how BADLY relevant it can be sometimes.
It makes me so sick I want to move to Canada damnit!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Most of the non-US national callcenters either give you a scripted reply or have you call a US callcenter if it's not in the scripts.
Most of those linguistic encounters were pretty lightweight. The image of a dear ol' granny from a different culture confronted not by an innocuous "Really!" but by one of the many variants on "Well fuck me!" is pretty funny. :-)
The trick lies of course in interpreting the emotional state rather than the words, but that requires knowledge of the culture and so is vastly harder to master than knowledge of the language.
Be careful about judging location from accent - you may be fooled.
True story: my employer was in talks with a major player in the industry for a contract (sorry, can't get much more precise than that).
So, we sent the lead engineer we would put on the project, and the head of the division that was in.
After a few hours of negotiations, the reps from the company we were talking to said, "Excuse us, but we thought your company was located in America?"
The engineer (A French citizen) and the exec (a British citizen) looked at each other, and said "Yes, we are located in Wichita, KS. Why do you ask?"
www.eFax.com are spammers
So remind me again why the oligarchs looting the country should give a rat's ass about sending jobs overseas?
It comes down to what you say and your security argument is a good one for this type of person (although personally I disagree). I prefer 'business security'.
You draw a line between your customer and the process that generates revenue. Everything on that line you should have directly under your control. If it can't be 100% (i.e., hardware support), then you must buy in redundancy.
The other side of this is that for Dell, this is a USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Dell corporate support now seems more attractive than one that is outsourced. Pitty it isn't the Inspirons as well. We have often used high end Inspirons instead of Latitudes although Dell describe it as a consumer model.
What do you click in this case:
"Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for the change to take effect. Reboot now?"
[ oui ] [ ja ]
There are things that can be outsourced to far away places. Portions of code can be programmed in a different country if strict specifications and quality control procedures are set out. Manufacturing of hardware has been the easiest part of IT to outsource... count the IBM motherboards out there that are made in Malaysia or Taiwan. And what IS the difference between Athlon chips fabricated in Malaysia or Germany?
Building all parts of a computer in USA will probably be like buying a baseline Pentium4 for $4000.
Support however should never be far from the point of service. This is like hiring a Network admin in India to support a small company in Toronto. Customer Support, beside being close to the engineers and design or manufacturing centres, should also be culturally and linguistically closer. I am personally surprised any company even attempted to outsource call centers to 11 time zones away.
I hope SMC follows suit.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Yes Hello fellow America Citizens. My name is Rashid, and like you fellow Americans, I am believing that this mistake is a large part on Dell. I am owning seven Optiplex computers and they all have failure. Some have two failure one day, seven failure two day. When I call tech centre in India, support that I receive is of top-rate. For example: I say to man: "My computer no start, and it eat my sandwhich!". Brave computer man say: "stop, no, do no be putting sandwich in computer, sir!" Problem resolved and no trouble ticket escalation necessary thank to intelligent Indian tech man. So to conclude essay, let me just say, please bring call centre back to India and pay those people once again to be doing tech support and please Dell give tech support a small raise so they can finally buy car. Good day.
...with camcorders on a cross country trip is not advertising, it's a rolling amateur porn show.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I encountered this particular deal. Bad enough to get a scripted response, but unintelligible English is just too much. Last weekend the same thing happened to my Dad trying to call DirectTV. The phone tech spoke unintillible English with a Mexican accent. For almost an hour I heard my dad trying to talk with the guy, "Could you repeat that slower, I can't understand you".
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
And when you type, the letters don't match your finger movements!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
This is good news for someone whose job is moving to India over the next three months. As the systems department manager, I am in the position of having to train the people taking my job in India, too-- without meeting any of them.
To say our Indian colleagues' skills are sub-par, would be an understatement. I realize the skills of the people I am working with may be an anomaly; however it is still the case.
I had no warning, and I was told on a Friday this would start the next Monday. Some people at the US ofice were immediately let go. I was told I was lucky to still have my job.
Perhaps I should just quit and let them sort out the details?
There are stupid ideas in outsourcing. I think this is one of them. It never made much sense to me that you could direct your customers phone calls to a foreign country, to people pretending to be Americans. If a company cares so little about good customer service that they are willing to go to such lengths to save a buck or two, they shouldn't be shocked that customers go to a different company that values them a little more, after all what else is there to differentiate one PC seller from another than good customer service?
I think companies will realize what makes sense to outsource, and what doesn't. A year ago, the software company I work for had a QA team in India, and was talking about moving all QA over there. Today we no longer have a team in India, the work has been brought back. It just wasn't working, the money saved on salaries was being lost in productivity. (dealing with time zone, language and cultural differences)
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Yesterday I called Compaq because the battery in my 6 month old laptop was already giving up the ghost. It was the first time I can honestly say that I've experienced an overseas call center. My issue did get handled but not before having to ask for things to be repeated several times while keeping my frustration in check.
they dont give a fuck!! if you're calling support, you already spent your bucks on their stuff so who cares if you're experiencing tons of problems using their products, lets just try to waste some more time on this topic c'mon
they dont give a fuck about you and me
did you pay already? good.
I posted this on Monday morning. I guess it's better late than never for /.
The person on the other end of the phone has a procedure she has to follow. She has to follow that stupid script. The calls are randomly monitored to ensure the phone monkeys are following their scripts.
It sucks, but everything about a call center job sucks.
That girl isn't going to risk getting in trouble for not following procedures, no matter how much it pisses off the customers. She's not being paid to provide good service and make customers happy, she's being paid to read the damn script.
Does that suck? Damn straight. I don't know how to fix it, short of burning down every fucking call center in the world. Hmmm, maybe we only need to burn all of the call center MANAGEMENT!
A major U.S. corportation has annouced job openings for english teachers to work abroad in places such as India....
Tooting is a place in London.
Paul Leader
Also, I don't get the whole "two ten / tooting" reference. Why was she saying tooting when asked her address?
Oh dear, Tooting is an area in London.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
I wonder if this has anything to do with the amount of attition that has been occuring in the tech support industry in India as seen here. Or if the attacks on the H1-B visas is making corporations worried.
Tooting is a suburb of London, and any resident of London should recognize it. Recently a lot of telephone directory services have moved their centres to India and other cheap countries, and lack of local geographical knowledge is proving to be a big problem.
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.
When will Dell start charging (like Microsoft) for telephone help?
so now i'll have to deal with an Indian accent and scripts form a call center here in the states
"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?"
Why do we need a trend? Companies always evaluate how things are working. Pretend you were just hired at Company X, who recently outsourced to India. You are now VP of Support operations, it's your call. Are you going to just move all operations back to the US upon starting your job, just because some other company did?
How are you going to explain the quadrupling in cost to the rest of the executive? The board? Good luck.
Now, if you can demonstrate that an unacceptable percentage of customers did not get the support you required them to get, you have a reason.
You are going to analyze costs, analyze the quality of service, listen to what the customers are saying.. and make that decision. No "Trend' is necessary.
If moving your support operations overseas results in cheaper service, with acceptable quality, however you decide to define that in your business goals, then it's a viable option. IF that quality turns out ot be below what you want, you move to change it... it's not like these companies outsource just for the hell of it, you know.
Oh. I see. Well then, yes, I get that now.
I have heard a lot of posts on the board that say
/creative that you 'cause they are not white. Of course deluding yourself might feel good in the short term .. Reality has a way of catching up..
1] Indians produce lower quality code.
2] Indian service is bad
3] Indian accents are hard to understand...
BLAH..BLAH...
You know what, you are saying all of the above because you are loosing your jobs to people in India. No amount of false complaints on the DELL websites/ forums can stop that [might slow it for some time].
I hope that you are not deluding yourselves into believing that Indians are less capable/ intelligent
Note that the european ['white'] renaissance occurred less than 600 years ago.. people from before the renaissance were not genetically different from those born after... and even 100 years ago most 'whites' used to empty their chamberpots in the streets in front of their houses.. find some info about the origin of the word 'loo'
Moreover given the low reproductive rates of 'white', it is fairly safe to say that the future does not belong to you.. As Mr. Smith [Matrix] would say " you had your time, the future belongs to US'..
Wesley Clark's comments from the debate last night. "Let them do the software in India; we'll do other things in this country."
Zoid.com
Now for my little tirade: I frankly think that's just the way the market evolves. No whining, if you're out of a job, get a new one. If you're complaining about putting food on the table, go back to school and clean gutters in the meantime. Make yourself smarter. Nobody owes you a job, especially if it's cheaper to give it to someone else. I bust my ass to make my job worth what they pay me, I don't go in punch a clock and expect that the union or whatever will make things all better. (and certainly not the government) I don't care what other countries are doing, and what kind of benefits the teamsters offer. I make my own money, and I make myself worth it. That's one thing I feel very strongly about, and I can't stand people who complain that the 'government doesn't give them enough' or that 'all the big companies think about is money.' That's what capitalism is. That's why there are big companies. They aren't there to give people jobs, they exist to make money. If you work at it enough you can put yourself on the winning side of capitalism instead of complaining that you're just a victim of it.
Speak for yourself.
after all, the management-speak of CEO's couldn't be any less condescending or understandable if it were spoken in a thick foreign accent - the employees might even feel (mildly) sorry for the speaker.
Unfortunately, the people who choose CEO's probably don't know any people with foreign accents (let alone backgrounds) at the golf club, so we don't have to "worry" about this.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I'm not legally married to a wonderful woman who looks at me funny when I speak perfectly acceptable geekish colloquialisms, say something spiced up with a bit of Douglas Addam sharp wit or Pythonesque influences or anything else to help, in my own mind, convey how silly or stupid or serious I really am about something. She'll sometimes sit and stare, as if she's trying to puzzle it out, then says, "Speak English."
I don't get it, I get seriously pissed when she does this. Like, did she grow up on a different planet than I did? She claims to have gone to college during the late 70's-early 80's so she's hip to some of the stuff that I might stick into a conversation. She remembers most Saturday Night Live material (I quote them often). But I always get "The Look".
I wish I could figure out why. But then again, this is another fine example of how each one of us is different in a zillion different ways. Some people parse language differences well, others don't.
Wow, what perfect coordination. The National "DO NOT CALL" list goes into effect putting hundreds of telemarketers out of work. In the midst of a sudden flood of personnel and empty office space pre-wired for call reception Dell steps in to rescue the minimum wage talkers we all love to hate.
If you think you're rid of scripts and air-headed support you're missing the big picture.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
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.
Many years later makelike still exists in this application. Whenever this function stops working helpdesk get's a call "Hi, makelike isn't working"...
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Wait until the 15 percent of the home consumers hear that their money is not worth the same as their businness counterparts. There goes 15 percent of Dell's customers.
As a 10 year occupant of a call center (no longer on the phones, thankfully), I'm amazed at the Slashdot crowd. The call centers I've worked in, visited and called where English is the native language often contain "native" speakers who cannot complete a sentence.
As a trainer, any time someone sounds like they're reading from a script, it's because they don't understand the technology they're supporting.
People who know technology won't take entry level jobs, at least, not for long. People who don't know technology will, but they don't make good technicians.
I notice no one is offering to pay more for their software and hardware so that good quality people can be hired and retained. You (don't) get what you (don't) pay for.
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.
Watch that they relocate to Louisiana...
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
...you can hire a Mexican to do the same work as an american for about 1/10th of the cost. However, you will only get about 1/15th of the productivity.
If a teacher is saying it, then shortly those who work in companies will be saying it, and then shortly those jobs will be coming back. Well, maybe in my little happy world.
-CPM
PS - no offence to any Mexicans out there.
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
I call bullshit.
It sounds like a bunch of made up situations. Either that or the person has the worst luck in finding the dumbest of the dumb - not knowing what a bill is?
As for the easter thing, as my brother-in-law told my wife when he was about 6...good friday is the day Jesus died. Easter is the day the easter bunny came along and dug him up.
We have recently had some reorganisation at work, and as a result had new phone lines and numbers.
A few weeks ago I had a phone call from BT asking if I was satisfied with the service, during this call my Account Manager told me that BT had conducted extensive research and discovered that businesses do not like dealing with call centres and have developed 'local business centres'.
So now when I want work doing I pick up the phone and ask for my Account Manager by name, and people even come to visit me to discuss my requirements!
It's just a shame that they had to spend a lot of their customers money getting it wrong and then putting it right again...
-- AndyW www: http://www.andrewwatson.net/ blog: http://andy_watson.blogspot.com/
Companies like Dell, Microsoft, Symantec, who believe they can cut costs by outsourcing and shipping customer service and support overseas are learning quickly that while it's helping their bottom line in the short term, it's negatively impacting customer satisfaction and loyalty for the long term.
Companies who believe that customer serivice and satisfaction IS PART of the bottom line, are rewarded with higher profit marigns, customer loyalty, increased customer satisfaction, and repeat purchases.
An example:
Apple Computer has won Consumer Reports award for Technical Support three years in a row. Why? Apple doesn't outsource their support because they believe customer satisfaction and support is part of bottom line. Apple believes that nobody can do support better than Apple for their own products, and they're right.
(To be accurate, Apple does outsource a very small portion of their support to another company in the States for overflow purposes only.)
We need Macintosh power. I *am* Macintosh power!
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.
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.
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?'.
Does this mean they are bringing back the Dell Dude (aka Puff Daddy) too?
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
Well, first of all if you have an Inspiron, this isn't going to help you, since they are moving support only for the corporate (Latitude and Optiplex) lines.
I can kind of understand where they are coming from. I do tech support, and I can't tell you how many people call thinking they know exactly what their problem is, when it's obvious in 30 seconds that they have no idea they are talking about. So sometimes you have to take what users say with a grain of salt.
I have blog like everyone else
Hot dog, Hot dog, yes sir, no sir?
[ok] [bye bye]
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".
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
This is only for CORPORATE customers. The article was very clear that other customers would still be stuck with bangalore, and that Dell had no plans to reduce their utilization of Bangalore.
Biased statement:
"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?"
What should have been said: (unbiased)
"Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognize that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centers around the world doesn't always result in customer appreciation and better quality?"
>>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.
Really? Is that really true, or do you just feel
a PC need to say that?
I'm genuinely asking, because comments like this
are made every time this subject comes up.
Have you genuinely experienced better
communication from non-native English speakers
(or those with a very, very different dialect
from your own) than from native speakers? On
average? Really?
I own a Pogo Altura. The CPU fan bearings froze up about a month after I bought it. I called Pogo and told them I needed a new CPU fan, and they overnighted me a new one, no questions asked. No asinine scripts to be read, just a real live American-English speaking and technically qualified person on the other end of the phone. I'd never buy a Dell considering the much higher quality of their competitors.
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,
The problem here is Dell neglected to account for the customer's time. It's easy for them to overlook, since they don't think they are paying for it, but in a way, they are. Every minute the customer is on the line, they pay a minute of opportunity cost. Thus, while the customer time is free to Dell, it is not free to the customer, and they perceive themselves are paying for the call, in the form of productive work they could have done that is not being done.
This is a very common problem, and it is exacerbated by the number of people who don't realize their time is valuable and hold entities like Dell accountable for the time they take to handle their problems. Indirectly, Dell will pay for wasting their customer's time, as they have learned. I hope this lesson propogates around the rest of the business world too.
(As in everything in life, a balance is required. One should not go through life seeing time solely in terms of money, because there are many things money can not buy. But by the same token, you should not value your time at "zero"; the "productive work" I refer to above may not be monetary, it may refer to time spent with family or something else you find beneficial.)
I was not planning on buying anymore Dell products strictly because I have hated their customer service for so long. It's about time they did something about it.
It still may be a bit of time before I feel they have redeemed themselves for such a lack of judgement. It would be nice to be treated as a customer again rather than an inconvience by Dell and having them save a "buck -or- two" rather than make the additional expendure actually count for something -- like customer service!
Technicians exclaiming "Dude, you're getting a small secluded wooded valley!"
We're in the PC hardware business. What is this "quality" you speak of?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Apparently, the Indian arm of Dell computer denies everything.
last few times i called for my latitude, i couldn't tell if i was talking to a person or a machine with an indian accent. and one guy was incredibly rude to me, declaring that there's no way my case could have broken in that way. how dare he insult an american who created his job!? of course when the technician arrived he told me that the latitude is a piece of shit, and he sees the hinges breaking all the time. well anyway, hurray!!! i like talking to people i can understand on the phone.
If the phone connection were clean enough to trick people (not end-lusers, mind you, real people like /.ers) into thinking that they were on the line with someone in the US. When I call my weird uncle up in Alaska, the connection always sounds like he's picked up in the middle of a grizzly attack and we frequently talk over one another because the sound doesn't hit his ear as soon as it leaves my mouth. I make very few overseas calls, but I can only imagine that it gets worse from there, especially if the call centers get the same quality of equipment that they do staffing.
Just me, though.
RE: call centers and scripts-
Don't know if you're lumping all technical support people into that group of "call centers", but my first job out of college was in tech support (and branched out into implementation and development within a year, but I digress), and we actually supported the people who called in. Yes, we had "trees" and top 10 lists to refer to, nifty little reports that we printed out from our tracking database telling us that 98% of the calls in X category were fixed by telling the user to pick the mouse up off of the floor, but we weren't forced to follow any sort of script or format beyond what common sense dictated. We weren't a huge freakin' cube farm, either, so if it's that kind of call center you're talking about it lets me out.
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
This is so fucking true....
In Soviet Slashdot, criticizing the actions of certain unscrupulous corporations (and being patriotic) gets you moded down as "flamebait." Yay! Slashdotter 1: Komrade, pour me another stakan of Vodka before I send 100,000 more jobs to fellow Komrades in Red China. Slashdotter 2: Vait a second - let me moderate down that bourgeois Kulak.
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.
There is also a large Convergys call center in SLC, Utah. They have done support for Direct TV, Cisco, and MS just off the top of my head.
The only way to end war is for everyone to get a piece!
handled from call centers in Texas, Idaho and Tennessee
Do they really think Texas and Tenessee accents will be easier (for most of the U.S.) to understand than Indian accents? Fact is, you are faced with the same problem no matter where you locate your call center!
They are merely rerouting through the US back to Bangalore. We are NOT fooled, I just spoke to Habib! About my Lattitude, it gives me an attitude...
CMM Company Appraisals
Take a look, there are definately more CMM level 4 and 5's in India than most of the rest of the world. This is why the IT industry looks to India for a quality product, and why companies outsource software production.
workers in india cannot be trained.
if they were worth a damn to begin with, they'd already be in the US working anyway.
I took a phone survey for AT&T Managed Security Services last week where they were asking how they could maintain or better their level of service.
I replied with what I thought they should not do. I said to the operator, "If AT&T MSS is considering farming the call center over seas, they should think again. I deal with a couple of vendors that have made my work life miserable since they offshored the call center."
I did not pass on the Microsoft and Dell were the two vendors that came to mind instantly in my head.
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
Ah man...now I'll never know where those lights on the back of the Optiplex GL-110 are. :-(
Everytime we called them about a problem with this model, they wanted me to look at these lights. Well..the only lights on the back of that model are the link/activity lights at the ethernet jack....which isn't what they wanted.
Anyway...I'm glad that it is moved back.
Accents can eventually be overcome.
This is not the start of a trend. It's an anomaly. Having call centers for common, commodity knowledge (such as elementary Windows and Dell hardware troubleshooting) is still a good idea that makes sense from a performance/expense perspective.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
All this talk about accents reminds me of this golden oldie (supposedly appeared in the FEER):
Room Service: Morny. Rune-sore-bees.
Hotel Guest: Oh, sorry. I thought I dialed Room Service.
RS: Rye, rune-sore-bees. Morny. Djewish to odor sunteen?
HG: Uh... yes. I'd like some bacon and eggs.
RS: Ow July den?
HG: What?
RS: Aches. Ow July den? Pry, boy, pooch...?
HG: Oh, the eggs! How do I like them? Sorry. Scrambled please.
RS: Ow July dee baycome? Crease?
HG: Crisp will be fine.
RS: Hokay. An Santos?
HG: What?
RS: Santos. July Santos?
HG: Ugh. I don't know... I don't think so.
RS: No. Judo one toes?
HG: Look, I feel really bad about this, but I don't know what "judo one toes" means. I'm sorry.
RS: Toes! Toes! Why djew Don Juan toes? Ow bow cenglish mopping we bother?
HG: English muffin! I've got it! You were saying toast! Fine. An English muffin will be fine.
RS: We bother?
HG: No. Just put the bother on the side.
RS: Wad?
HG: I'm sorry. I meant butter. Butter on the side.
RS: Copy?
HG: I feel terrible about this but...
RS: Copy. Copy, tea, mill...
HG: Coffee! Yes, coffee please. And that's all.
RS: One Minnie. Ass rune torino fee, strangle aches, crease baycome, tossy cenglish mopping we bother honey sigh, and copy. Rye?
HG: Whatever you say.
RS: Hokay. Tendjewberrymud.
HG: You're welcome.
Now I think about it, it's damn weird. I live in Oakland, CA. I find it easier to understand English speakers from India than half the population of this city.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
While I first rejoiced at IT jobs returning to the US, I almost as immediately understood what had happened:
In this country, even the clearest mildest foreign accent elicits reactions of "he doesn't even speek English." Ig-nunt callers were more than likely reacting in this way to the likely very clear and probably better English of the Indian helpdesk workers.
Now that things have returned to Texas, we'll all hear our scripted support responses pronounced by the products of a school system where our own language is not really a priority when compared to football (especially in Texas, in the case of football). Now, in addition to the new accent, we'll have to deal with folks who have a hard time following our own questions, thanks to the fact that they will be the people who could not get better IT jobs in our slumped US IT labor market.
So, in the end, is it an outrage or a blessing that this particular shipping of jobs off shore has been ended by bigotry and ignorance?
I feel like tooting some coke...
The adverts have been jokey in nature, but scathing to their competitors at the same time.
(if this is a double post it's because of the "Slow Down, Cowboy" rule requiring a 20 second reply timeout)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Whenever one of these Tech Companies & India articles crops up, the tone of the conversation takes a pretty nasty turn. So far I've seen a good few cheap jibes at accents, and a lot of stuff seeming to indicate that the average Indian is somehow less alternative than his American counterpart.
There's a good few comments from people who used cheap Indian companies and got buggy products. One, this is unsubstantiated, two, if you went for a decently priced Indian company instead of aiming for the cheapest, perhaps you might not get such a heap of junk in return.
The worst offender so far has compared what he calls the Indian memory-based system of education system to the superior American problem-solving one, concluding apparently that the vast majority of the county are thus unable to solve problems productively.
Christ almighty!
I'm not Indian, I'm Irish. I've got a 1st class honours degree in Computer Science, won a scholarship and was declared a college scholar a few times for being near the top of my class. However graduating with a CS degree in 2002 sucked and I ended up in a call-centre to tide my over while I went job hunting. We were doing timeshare exchange and I was hopeless at it.
These companies pay people a little over minimum wage, give little or no training in the product they sell and are sales orientated to the detriment of the customer. I was told to use the arcane software they used and that was it. I climb on my holidays, I hadn't a bog about Tenerife or the Costa del Sol or any of it, and I had to scramble to answer calls. All the time the pressure was on to get sales and dump unproductive callers.
Of course, as soon as I got something better I left.
These companies generally employ under-educated people, pay them peanuts and treat them like automata. Anyone with a hint of intelligence moves on. The average American call-centre isn't much better I'd wager, Dell simply moved their premium customers to a premium centre, where people are better trained and better treated.
Using this story, as many have done, as a chance to insult a nation in a self-righteous display of xenophobia is deeply unpleasant, and it's sad and shocking to see how prevalent it is here.
Bryan Feeney - who has a nick but can't remember the password
I really have no idea, but let's say a tech support person can take 5 calls an hour. Wouldn't the difference between international and domestic phone rates cover the increased cost of hiring someone local to take the calls?
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
We as Americans make companies like Dell outsource. We are so buget conscience that the only way these companies can stay in business is to employ cheaper labor. Think about it.
Soon we will all be living the lifestyles of third world countries (except for the economic elites of course). Global equality will have arrived!
"...after an onslaught of complaints from dissatisfied customers who couldn't cope with the differing accents and scripted responses."
I can see how this would eliminate the accent problem, and believe me, that's a great thing, but what about the scripted responses? Is Dell actually going to start training the phone techs so that they can offer worthwhile advice, or will it still be scripted responses linked to a database of questions and answers? Will I just be able to understand the guy who says "Rebooting didn't work? Try power-cycling it while I check Google..." Or will there actually be a competent techie on the other end who understands me when I say "The SCSI backplane for my eight-disk RAID array is displaying random errors and I need you to send me a new one before the parity stripe gets corrupted and starts overwriting other data!"
And yes, that's a true story about Dell...
... work in the same building as one of Dell's old call centers. They were a call center for several other companies as well. They'd hire anyone as long as they passed the test and could sit through 2 weeks of training. During training one employee broke the pins off a CPU trying to get it back into the ZIF socket the wrong way. If the folks in india were worse than that I feel sorry for Dell, even though I hate them. People who don't understand the concept of a ZIF socket shouldn't tell others how to diagnose their PC's. I hope that their new american call centers are a little better than that.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Maybe the problem isn't the schools teaching our technical people but our business schools. Seems managers and owners need to have the ability to look ahead beyond the next quarter hammered into their thick skulls.
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
Then the nerd just posts your question to Slashdot and sends you the URL for the article's comments section.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Seriously, you get what you pay for. I've talked to PC companies on the phone for support before and it is painful.
I called Apple last Friday about my powerbook (white spots in the screen). I got a nice guy in Austin who had a box on the way to me in 5 minutes. He even made a joke about Walmart.
Worth a couple of extra bucks every time.
You got it backwards. Ignorant/stupid/lazy(pick one) end users will always pick NO. They are too afraid to change anything and they don't read. Have you never had a user that clicked NO to the question; "Windows was unable to connect to your networked drive. Would you like to reconnect in the future?" I can't tell you how many peer to peer clients I've had to go a remap drives for because they didn't clearly read that question. They answered NO because they thought that was the answer that would change nothing. I had some clients that I wrote "Fix it" batch files that reconnected the drives.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I can't imagine any town or city in the U.S. were they wouldn't know what a "bill" is in the context of a meal at a resturaunt
I can't speak for this particular circumstance, but I think there are a number of factors that can turn an understandable statement like that into something completely incoherent. I have worked with a lot of foreigners and sometimes my brain is going overtime just trying to understand what they are saying, let alone what they mean. It's like in order to understand the speaker, you need to back way off certain speech cues and you end up losing a lot of your ability to process what they mean. When they say something a little off that would make sense coming out of a native speaker's mouth, it still doesn't make sense because you can't pick up on those cues.
Another related possibility is that when you start talking with a non-Native speaker, your brain loads up an alternate meaning interpretation engine with a reduced set of colloquialisms and meanings. For example, if my brain were in non-Natve speaker mode, I might not expect someone to use a phrase like "give a ring" to indicate calling a person or calling on a person. This is a kind of advanced phrase I might only load up for a native speaker. Instead, I might be inclined to take it literally, at least at first.
I can just imagine:
Customer: My hard drive failed after the first week of use. It made a grinding sound, and then smoke started coming out.
TechSupport: What version of Windows are you using?
Customer: I'm running Red Hat Linux 8.0.
** silence **
I find it amusing that in reality there are more people in India that speak English (think former British colony) then there are in the U.S. that do. So do you define English by where it started (England) or the largest number of speakers (India) either one is not the United States. So refer to it like it is. You want people to use an U.S. accent which in itself is also a valid request; but not by saying that they are not speaking English.
I worked in a cube farm for Sykes, which had a contract with e-machines at the time. Clover Kicker is right, the script monkey has procedures and scripts.
My evaluations were only 30% technical, the rest was procedure and being halfway nice. It truly was a nightmare for me and my customer-victims when I first started out because I was way undertrained and way overworked. Once I did get a clue, the requirement for following a script didn't go away. Nobody ever told me to use my brain, or gave me signifigant power to skip steps, so I never did. Sorry e-whores, I'm loyal to whoever signs my check.
Occasionally I did get someone who knew what they were doing, and was willing to play the game. I always cut the procedures to the bone for them. The tech-gods who tried to play games and fake that they were following along were made to follow every last trick. I know it is kind of juvenile, but it was protection for me.
Remember folks, when you (thru the manufacturer of your machine) hire someone for low wages, put them in a cage, and hit them with a stick every 12 minutes, you get incompetent, angry, dung-flinging techno-monkeys. The really smart ones insist on being transfered to a more interesting account or quit. BTW, don't talk to a call center drone after their shift for about an hour. Don't touch them, don't even look at them wrong if you want to live.
e-machines/Sykes Rant Follows
They both suck.
e-machines is possibly the most incompetent company I have been involved with. Some of the early e-machines 200 & 300 models were solid little performers, they hardly ever broke down. It all went to hell after that. We would learn about new models of computers from the customers.
They ran out of power supplies at the fulfillment center because the only factory that made them was in Bangladesh and it flooded. One third of the country is below sea level, duh! Instead of pulling power supplies out of the machines in the fulfillment center, we had to tell customers to send their whole machines in and that they would be sent a replacement machine. I'm serious.
One of the supervisors thought it was a good idea to walk up and down the cube aisles complaining about her PMS issues, and how tense she was. An overstressed cube dweller does not need to be hearing these things.
e-machines finally took the support account away from Sykes and gave it to another company, Stream something, I think. The rub is that they didnt' tell the customers or Sykes. In effect, you had two companies working in parallel whithout communicating and without the customers knowing. That period was one of the few times I tolerated swearing from my customers, I was barely not doing it myself.
I ain't even gonna start about the wisdom of calling a person with two days of training a "Qwest Internet Support" person.
I know this is seriously off the original topic, but do you see how this could beat down a person's will? All I had left was the pride that I did my job exactly as specified and lived thru the day. That's a pretty small thing to hold on to, but there it is.
One of the few times I was proud of my company was when a storm went thru the state of Georgia, wiping out modems by the thousands. The line supervisors came by and told us to just get on with giving out replacements. The script went something like "So, you can't dial out? From Georgia? Hold on I'll get you an RMA." It was one of the few times things made sense and a genuine thrill.
Just a bit bitter, ain't I?
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
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.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
The truth is that most tech support calls (80-90%) are FTF (First Time Fix).
Remember, Dell is only outsourcing corporate calls. FTF calls are most likely to be technically challenged users (we've all met them - those that complain of funny sounds when the phone while browsing etc.) I'd be willing to bet that far fewer corporate support calls (some of which, clearly, will originate from inhouse tech guys), are FTF.
In other words: Corporate = Slightly less idiotic = Less likely to be FTF
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
since nearly all german callcenters were moved to eastgermany and I for one don't understand a word of the saxion accent.
nom,
Lispy
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.
India...We put the "dot" in dot com!
Probably not worth posting, but what the hell. Call centers will eventually move to Canada, where the free health care (i.e. no cost to insure workers) tax incentives and the stregth of the U.S. dollar (I think, is our dollar stronger than theirs?) work in their favor. Sorry folks, but Americans want too high a standard of living for our corporate masters' tastes.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Because it would be nice to see them get them jobs back in the good ol' US of A, even if it was them who dun moved um.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
fuck the towel heads........
My parents bought one of those home desktop computer deals with free AOL time bundled in. Turns out they needed technical support from AOL and ended up talking with some guy with a heavy accent. The 'rents said even three separate phone calls, each reaching a different CSR, weren't enough to clear up the matter. They just couldn't understand the technicians' language.
So i am not surprised that large companies would be moving toward having more understandable CSRs if they want to help maintain their revenue stream.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Umm, I don't get that first link. Was it supposed to be funny? There was nothing said that should have been misinterpreted. If someone in a parking lot asked me "for a jump," I would know exactly what there were talking about. In fact, that's probably the exact phrase I would expect to hear from someone. Same thing if someone was to tell me they would "give me a ring tomorrow." What's hard about that? I've probably said that myself. And I live in 'the South' which is pretty notorious for is horrendous butchering of the English language (as evident by my post, perhaps.)
You forget that those words are not said the same way you would expect an American speaker to say them (I don't say native, because this applies even if you are speaking to a native speaker from a different country). There is an entirely different cadence, body language and tone of voice when a foreign speaker says the same words which have a tendency to throw you off balance and take a completely different meaning from an ambiguous sentence.
If you have spent much time speaking with someone using a completely unfamiliar accent, you will notice that your brain takes a little longer to process everything - there seems to be a lag of about a couple of seconds between the person saying something and you understanding it.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Any sort of group that is coding JUST for money, is not going to do as good a job as those who are inspired. Programming is one area where a small mistake near the beginning multiplies in consquence geometrically as time progresses. If you aren't committed to the job, if you are just committed to cranking up the programming hours to make more money, you aren't going to care about more code, more work, more bugs, more maintainance. THAT's WHAT YOU WANT!!! One wrong design move means thousands of extra programming hours in most cases, MOST cases. Part of avoiding bad design, and bad coding is peer inspection and brainstorming. Without a group spirit, without high speed exchange of ideas at the time they are ripe, you are going to get stale, tired and buggy code. This is true wherever your code is "outsourced" away from its inspiration point. It doesn't matter what country is involved. Have you ever heard of superior code coming out of a job shop?
I know IBM has overseas support centers, and it drives me nuts when I get patched through to one. I can't understand what the rep is saying half the time. On two occasions I verified our company mailing address multiple times on the call for parts shipments, to make sure it was correct, and they still got it wrong. That delayed my shipment by 3 weeks (was overnight).
Exactly!
My friends and associates have had to deal with this a lot. Our biggest prediction is that in the rush to save money companies are cutting their own throats by creating the next wave of competitors. Yes, programmers on the other side of the globe will work cheaper then here - but then THEY get the knowledge and experience in creating those products.
In 5 years or so, when those programmers have cut their teeth on the project, there will be new Indian/cheap labeor country companies selling their own software - why let the US company get all the profit?? They will start their own company and sell directly to us.
When it comes to "Intellectual Property" (ugh) it seems idiotic give that property away.
I feel (and truly hope) that this is the beginning of the end for this offshore fiasco that has been going on. My company is getting into the India thing too and you can truly see the difference. Poor communications, extremely poor quality and just no concern. You have to do ten times more effort into requirements to "dumb" them down to the level that the Indians can hopefully understand them. Then once the work comes back, there is more time to rework something than the original estimate to do it doemstically in the first place. I think once you factor in all the costs, not just the straightup cost of the people, you see that this whole offshore idea is not a good one with the possible mind numbing tasks that the American worker would never do anyways. Also, don't forget to add in the cost of communications. It will blow your mind.
Take a look at the folks who contribute to projects on SourceForge.net - many successful projects with many contributors and users from just about every location around the world. These people don't have "face time", their native languages are different, time zones are (literally) all over the map. Yet they manage to turn out apps and code that work. Yes - not all of the projects are successful, but many are. Why is that? If Open Source developers can "many-shore" themselves (with no management -- but good leadership) shouldn't IT be able to do the same?
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
...Dell is moving its call center operations ...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.
Because they like scripted responses better in english? How is that going to change?
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
"A company that will go to the ends of the earth for its people will find it can hire them for about 10% of the cost of americans"
Despair.com
Does the primary language of the person who programs your dialog boxes really matter?
I have 7 words for you:
All your base are belong to us.
Exactly, obviously many developers (like myself) have had to deal with the crap designs and code generated by these "outsourcing deals" in India. They produce something for pennies on the dollar and you spend the next two years trying to keep your customer base and fix (re-write) the code. Forget adding real features.
Anyone ever get code back with meaningful comments in it?
Ever seen 92 constructors in a base class with no comments? I have...
Dell saw a major problem and corrected it. When they start to lose the home market, hopefully they will do the same they did for corporate America.
Hoefully corporate America realizes they are in the process of bankrupting their future. With all of this talk about Homeland Security, does anyone have any real statistics on what is being outsourced overseas?
I went through tech support hell and didn't have my Inspiron for a month this summer while I first tried to convince some idiot in Bangalore that my ether port was defective, and then tried for 4 weeks to find status. The call people were not only *completely* clueless - and this is also the fault of Dell IT, for not providing good tools for them - but actually pretty rude as a rule.
This notebook was my first and last Dell product.
It's time to put a stop to offshore outsourcing or at least punish those companies that do. Why should the US government or state governments grant contracts to companies that pay overseas workers. Out tax dollars shouldn't go to Bangalore. They should go to Americans who will put the money back into the US economy. Write your representatives in Congress and in your state governments and let 'em know you're pissed. www.StopOffshoreOutsourcing.com
dissatisfied customers who couldn't cope with
That problem isn't particular to India or any other outsourced venue.
Just about every knowledgeable person I've met has, at one time or another, complained of Support Desks that beancounters have cost-economized into paragons of efficiency filled with low-paying positions by having techs read through a flowchart.
You know:
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Many companies have outsourced customer support to locations in poor states in the West and mid-West. Always seemed to make perfect sense to me. There are no cultural differences, there are no issues with accents, the people work hard, and they work cheap. There's also the issue of time difference. Those folks I know who outsource to India constantly have a problem with time differences, and there's just no getting around that. Consequently, you have miscommunications that while small, cause big problems.
So why not outsource this sort of activity to South Dakota or Montana or Idaho? They would love the work, I'm sure.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
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.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I am not understanding what all this hullaballoo is about. My english is being most excellent.
Moving the Executive jobs to India? Cmon, think of it, a Intelligent looking figurehead for your company for $7.25 per day?? Sounds like a bargain.. Moving one job saves you millions, instead of moving thousands of jobs, and think about what the Customers would think.. they would flock to you for being frugal, and preserving jobs while slashing labor costs..
Brian
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Are you 100 years old or something? Because it sounds like you're calling 411 and saying something like "I want the number of the hardware store over on McGillicuddy across the street from the old Mill. You know the one." ...which hasn't been possible in a long time.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Perhaps, but I did read the text in my best (worst?) Apu accent.
"Thank you for not robbing me today, sir."
If you are a tech and want to get through tech support for something as quick as possible, follow these simple rules:
1. NEVER and I mean never, tell the person on the phone you do tech support. This only makes them think you are arrogant and you are trying to tell them what to do.
2. Have your product with you and all serial/ID numbers ready.
3. Give a description of the problem or a specific error message. Never tell them "The power supply is bad, I need a new one." This will only impede your progress as they will get offended and make you perform EVERY useless step on their script(and maybe some that aren't).
4. Be polite and try to sound like a Joe User. This allows them to feel superior. A superior tech is a happy tech.
5. If they ask if you have performed test X, say YES. They may ask you to repeat it while they are on the phone, this is OK, just do it.
6. If you are a good tech you can use common errors to guide them to the proper diagnosis. This let's them feel accomplished and gets you your end result.
I have known many techs and most are low paid and hate their jobs. By appeasing their ego and not trying to tell them how to do their job, they will at least have a little job satisfaction. If you come off as arrogant, you will find yourself on hold a lot while they "research" your problem.
Just my experience...
The only way to end war is for everyone to get a piece!
Well now pardner, you must be one them old boys from Back Easy a ways, eh? Got a little hitch in yer giddyap 'bout us Texans then, huh?
What burr crawled up your britches and set your saddle on fire? You know a good coating of that there Preparation H can cure most things 'cept a bad temper-ment.
Didja hear the one 'bout the Yankee and the Texan at the parade?
Seems the Yankee came down to see a Rodeo parade ther in Austin see, and he got hisself all ready to stand there and watch as the procession rode by.
Well, the old Texan takes a look at him and sees that Yankee sitting there (he has to be a Yankee, cuz only a Yankee would wear a bowler to a damn Trail Ride parade) and notices he got him a dog on a leash there.
Natch, the Texan being all friendly, looks over at the Yankee and asks him: "Say Mister, what kinda dog you got there?"
The Yankee just looks down his nose at the Texan and let out a big "Harumph!" like he figured that there Texan warn't worth talking to.
Well, the Texan, he didn't particlarly like that see, so he asks him again: "Say Mister, I'm a talking to ya, what kinda dog is that?"
Well that thar Yankee, see, he was just all kinds of mean see, so he looks over to the Texan and he says: "Well, I tell you, he is half son-of-a-bitch and half-Texan, that's what he is."
Well, that made the Texan glad then, see. He turned to the Yankee and said:" Well now, I guess that makes him kinda related to both of us, don't it?"
BTW: This is called humor, and should be taken as such. The way I originally heard it told was from Justin Wilson in Dan McClusky's and the part of the Yankee was played by a Texan and the Texan was played by a Coon-Ass (Louisana Slang for Cajun:someone from South Louisiana of French descent who has adopted the Acadian lifestyles and manners and probably lives on the Bayous eating Crawfish and Shrimp, loving their red beans and rice, Cheyenne Pepper, Heinz 57 sauce and speaking French with a Spanish inflection).
Of course, most Americans don't know the Emeril Lagasse was a transplant and not a native of Louisiana. Real Cajun food is something to appreciate and enjoy.
Oh yes, I can speak regular English without an accent too. I only slip back into "country" mode when I go back into the rural areas of Texas.
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
Dell Australia Tuesday said the U.S. support service would eventually be routed backed to the Indian call center--but in bites that its Bangalore support staff can swallow. It appears that Dell overestimated the capacity of its Indian call center when it made the decision to divert U.S. customers to the new support service. A spokeswoman for the system manufacturer's Australian operation today revealed that for Bangalore it was a case of too many calls, too soon. "A lot of [the customers] were moved in one go and that was where some of the complaints had arisen so what they've looked at doing is moving some back and then moving them off in smaller increments," she said. Dell has eased the burden on it Bangalore operation and appeased its business customers by diverting U.S.-originating enquiries pertaining to its corporate OptiPlex desktop and Latitude laptop computers to a facility believed to be in Texas. How the customers receive the return to an India-based service is yet to be known. While the problems with the center were isolated problem concerning the scale of U.S. Dell executives have been shy about revealing the nature of the complaints maintains. Also, U.S.-based analyst with research firm Technology Business Research, Brooks Gray, said language problems and delays in escalating enquiries to senior technicians was the source of grief for many Dell customers. For now, Dell's U.S. corporate customers are the only group to receive local service. Dell Australia said there were no plans to make similar arrangements for its Australian corporate customers. The company insists that current service levels were "satisfactory" and the problems experienced by U.S. customers were isolated to the segment of the Bangalore operation covering that region. "The U.S. situation is purely based around scale and the quantity of customers being moved over in one go and that's not an issue that we've had in Australia," said the spokeswoman. Dell's Asian and European support lines will remain routed to Bangalore. Dell's decision comes amidst allegations and grumblings that support operations outsourced to India are not performing as hoped. -------------www.StopOffshoreOutsourcing.com
You have hit the nail on the head. The economy would recover much nicer if it were illegal to offshore thesen higher paying jobs. I just can't understand why the lawmakers don't see the problem this is causing to the tax base and the spending power of the American public. Just think, take all the jobs that have been outsourced and give each of those jobs to an American worker (US Citizen) and what do your economic indicators look like then? Would be interesting.
...being fired because of race/gender/age discrimination = but not on pay discrimination?
Look - if US companies don't want to spend so much on payroll maybe they shouldn't offer fresh college grads $70K because they took a class or two in C++.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I'm currently working on a project here in the UK with a large offshore (India) component. All the database extracts we sent over had to have the names and addresses 'mangled' to prevent individual customers from being identified. This is something to do with the Data Protection Act and shipping test data to a non-EU country.
Other engineers are licensed professionals, why not software engineers? I think as the public continues to experience the adverse affects of crappy software, we actually have a shot at selling ourselves as professionals. This might mean more education or dicipline and it may raise the bar to a level where many of the existing developers can't attain licensing, but so what - they shouldn't be writing code anyway. I think licensing would be a great solution to the continued outsourcing of developers, and yes I'll continue to say so as long as slashdot keeps posting stories about it :)
And the Texas or Tennessee accent is better than a Bangalore accent how?
Success factors are:
- Experience in sucessfully completing projects. Companies
that fail on in-house projects will also fail on off-shore
projects.
- Experience with the off-shore development method,
which requires that you rigorously define requirements
and monitor carefully. This applies to both the project
management and staff. A long term relationship between
both companies is even better.
- Competent and communicative management at both ends.
- Occasional visits (in either direction) that help
detect all the stuff that falls though the cracks.
- Both the local and the off-shore company having a stake
in the success of the project.
Obviously, much of the success dependend on experience, which you can only get by having completed off-shore projects. This means there's a relatively high barrier to entry for the company that wants to save money by off-shoring projects and they must accept a slow payback. The low risk strategy is to start with small, low risk projects (which are usually cheaper done in-house!) to build up experience.There are a lot of 'hidden costs' associated with off-shore projects, that you won't encounter until it's too late. Most of the problems relate back to two factors:
- Cultural differences - Even when you take this into account,
you'll get burned. Things you take for granted will be evaluated
completely differently at an off-shore site. It's not that's anybody
is right or
wrong, it's just that 'they' have different answers for things that
are obvious to 'us'. This means that lot of extra communication
will be needed (about stuff you never ever dreamed could be a problem).
- Geographical separation - Informal contact between management,
users, developers, etc. makes up for a lack of rigor
when specifying systems. We're all guilty of not being exact and
detailled enough when writing specs. Indeed most companies can't afford
the rigor (or the testing!) required to produce a functioning system
and survive because all the stakeholders are close by and take the
time to interact 'outside official channels'. This generally isn't available
for off-shore projects, except when the teams have been working together
for a number of years.
The conclusion: there's no silver bullet.BTW: When problems happen in off-shore IT projects they lead to failed projects and companies lose money. This also happens in foreign relations it leads to real problems.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
I think you have your wires crossed. You need to stop watching so much TV. It's changing the stimulus response of your brain. You respond to TV the way you should respond to sexual stimulus--ie, your girlfriend in a tedddy. "Ooh, my girlfriend wants to have sex," is what a correctly wired human male should have immediately thought. You should have already been in procreation mode and should have never even heard the Simpsons theme song being entirely focussed on sex.
I work with people of different ethnicity.
It isn't lack of intelligence of even ambition, I think it is a different society, and attitude.
North Americans tend to do, or build up ideas from the bottom, a lot of do it all yourself, and take a bit more responsibility for stuff.
Others tend to have each person do their job, decisions are dictated by the boss, or the appropriate standard.
"All Your Bases Are Belong to Us" ...I don't know. You tell me.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I will now consider recommending and buying Dell equipment again. This summer I had to spend some grueling half an hour on the phone to have a replacement part ordered. I swore I would never do business with Dell again and fretted about the state of american IT.
Now, those companies hiring Indian comapnies as programming sweat shops ought to think about this too: quality control is as poor as language skills. Not that I think there aren't bright people in India and from India, but those are not who you are hiring from these contractors.
Here's a cut-n-paste of an email I got from Dell support this morning. I don't know if the guy is from India but he did have some type of accent on the phone. Anyway, I kind of understood the first paragraph. Anyone want to take a whack at deciphering the second paragraph for me?
Now, my original complaint was that we've already replaced the hard drive a few times and wee ought to look for an underlying cause. That was completely ignored...
I am planning to purchase a PC for my almost techincally illiterate parents. Anyone have an idea of how bad Gateways service is?
"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?"
I for one am very happy to see Dell's call centers return to the U.S., because it will employ more IT people here, create another IT job track for kids now in college, and ultimately provide better customer service which is what thist is all about.
Kudos to Dell for recognizing a problem and doing something about it. Not just for the bottom line which is what will benefit anyway after the customer benefits.
if electricity is created by electrons, is morality created by morons?
The worst scenario is for a company to retreat from TWVs and outsourcing at the last minute, claim they are doing it "due to public pressure" and then blame all the problems arising from TWVs and outsourcing on inappropriate intervention from government. Then they hobble along and suppress competition from smaller companies in the US.
I can see it coming.
Seastead this.
Here is a story someone (not me
----------------
QuarkXpress was indisputably the #1 publishing layout software in the world and almost all its users ran it on the Mac. In fact, this issue of graphics and publishing software on the Mac was probably the primary reason Apple computer even survived.
The original owner sold the company and the new owners fired the entire development staff and outsourced all development and customer service to India. They claimed that India had far superior developers who worked at a lower price and produced better, more stable, more feature filled software because of their better education and attention to process, a la the Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.
The project to port Quark to OS X, a simple carbonization exercise that many other programs of similar complexity accomplished with a modest staff over a period of a few months, dragged on and on in India. Eventually, the resulting version 6 was delivered two years late and at a far greater cost tahn any one could have imagined. But many customers had held on during these years and ignored the technically superior, file compatible, and less expensive Adobe InDesign (built in the USA, oddly). Customers had even refused to upgrade their hardware because Quark 4 (most skipped v5) didn't run well on newer machines that could not boot into OS 9. Apple's hardware sales suffered as a result. Apple even provided, free of charge, Apple consultants to India to assist with the port. But finally, very recently, version 6 was released and customers started to upgrade their hardware and move to version 6. During the two years, Quark went from around 90% market share to about 50%, but they still were a major player. Customers had a long history with the company and much invested in understanding the quirky and nonstandard ways that the software worked, and they did not want to give up on that investment.
Here are customer reviews of version 6:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos x/ 11887
Read all 261 reviews.
Among the problems are file incompatibility, draconian licensing, sluggishness, poor feature set, nonstandard UI, instability, and so forth. In addition to this, the program reuires a flakey and unreliable dial up activation scheme as well as a dongle and can only be run on one computer total. If you want to work on your lap top AND your desktop as just about everyone does, you MUST buy 2 licenses at an outlay of two thousand dollars. In addition, customer support is abysmal. for your money you are entitiled to only one customer support issue through email. If you have a second issue, you must pay $15 for each emailed-to-india question. Customers have found that Quack hangs up, refuses to answer, provides nonsensical answers, and requires you to pay multiple times in a single-issue guessing game in which they play stupid in response to your questions in order to bilk you out of additional support money, just like a phone sex operator tries to keep you on hold as long as possible.
In the last three months, of the 50% of the market who was waiting for Quark 6 to come out, most of them have upgraded their hardware and tested Quark 6. The result is amazing -- almost all customers, within days of acquiring Quark 6, bought InDesign and are in the process of migrating, never to return. Adobe's sales have flown through the roof in the meantime.
So the market leader has completely gutted their business. No one will be left to buy any version 7. It's the last straw.
As a side issue, I'll note that in the last few months it has been extremely entertaining to watch questions posted on programming lists from senior engineers with quark.co.in and other
cpeterso
we can determine our own destiny...help the rest of the world
man, I want some of what you been sniff'n
Seriously, it is and has been one global economy for more than a generation. Get out and see it...then tell me it's not.
Dell denies moving Bangalore jobs to US
November 25, 200314:32 IST
Last Updated: November 25, 200314:49 IST
Dell India on Tuesday dismissed reports that it was shifting its technical support service for its business customers from Bangalore to the United States.
"No, we are not shifting the work. Dell is committed to India and are growing," a spokesperson for the Bangalore-headquartered Dell India told PTI on Tuesday.
She said Dell had over 2,000 people working at its customer support centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
The spokesperson declined comment on reported complaints by its business customers in understanding Indian executives because of differing accents.
Dell, the world's largest PC maker, opened its Bangalore centre in April 2001 and rapidly expanded its workforce to over 3,000 employees.
A spokesman of the Texas-based company earlier said there were complaints from clients, but declined to discuss their nature.
However, media reports said these were about differing accents.
"Corporate customers were telling us they didn't like the level of support they were getting and in the normal course of business, we made some adjustments," the spokesman was quoted by InfoWorld, which specialises in IT news, as saying.
"What (customers) said was, 'You guys have been changing some things and we don't like it as much'," Steve Felice, vice president, corporate division, Dell, told Mercury News.
I worked for dell customer care their system is so screwed i dont see how anyone gets anything accomplished, its not the workers , becaue the workers cant say anything thats not on a script , they can be original , cant give suggestions cant give out any helpful info the workers are made to be "robots" and when the "superiors" give the workers a pep talk , its basicly a fuck you with a smile and a pat on the back.....the line was actually used once "when you grow up , you can make money like we dco" and they were speaking to 18-60 year olds anyway thats just to give you an idel of how it really is
"Always darkest before the Dawn"
I think these days C++ programmers would usually prefer to use std::vector<> instead of CArray. And even in C style code you could use enums instead of #defines for constants. If you're going to be told off for using C++, at least use it heroically :-)
Scotland has gotten a lot of investment from companies that have built call centres there. Apparently to English ears the Scottish accent is associated with honesty and integrity.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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.
--
$tar -xvf
than some below average fat-ass Asperger's Syndrome Geek.
'kindly do the needfull' (want to stomp someone when I read or hear that phrase)
..search for your district and do something more than just post on this forum. because jobs going away are just the beginning. Who is going to buy these products being made or supported from India when more jobs get moved overseas? the folks overseas? are they going to come over here and eat lunch at McDonalds or the local diner, buy clothes from the local , purchase a new vehicle from the local auto dealer, and thus stimulate the local economy?
Usually the needful consists of restoring some servers' volumes from the ashes of a so-called UNIX ADMIN in our India data center.
'ahh this vxdg destroy command should repair this production disk group '
and when things like this happen (daily) all we kept hearing is 'we need to train them up'
Well, you train them, you train them some more...you script everything they need to do (literally), you write procedures down to the 'T' describing how to fix problems that occur and STILL THEY JACK S#$T UP!
It's not language, it's stupidity. If the people working in the datacenters over in India were competent, they would have already been in the US or Canada by now.
I finally quit my previous job because I was tired of hearing all the excuses from management and tired of the blanket of lies being laid over to the higher-up management on up to the top. The fact is that you can't hope to save money by keeping a few people in the US and sending them to India on 3 month shifts to train people who are either:
A. untrainable because they were driving a rick-shaw the day before.
B. going to quit the next day because you showed them how to type the 'passwd' command which fills a void on their empty resume and enables them to go get a new job as a super-unix-admin at TI or wherever.
The only way this is going to stop is to vote with your wallet but also to write your congressman/woman. Money talks, but bad voter satisfaction screams.
You can do this online
oh by the way, don't go anywhere near an Indian's left-hand if you are in India...trust me on this one.
As a test, our client insisted on purchasing only two systems from Dell.
When two rather trivial problems were sent to "support", they were unable to receive a cogent resolution to either problem and there was no 'easy' method of contacting anyone outside of the India facility.
At that point, we recommended that the client obtain their required 3,500 systems from a competitor who had competent domestic customer service.
Our client's "test" proved that Dell didn't think this was anyone worth dealing with and lost the bigger sale.
The competitor didn't care that there were only two systems purchased, they simply wanted a happy customer.
Unfortunately, given even worse experiences that I and others have had with the quality of the equipment and support from Gateway, Compaq, and HP, Dell is still the only massive PC computer manufacturer I can recommend to someone who doesn't want a truely custom-built machine. I've never had experience with their non-corporate support, but in my experience and those that I work with, for most users the Dell machines themselves are fairly good. (Though as you say, recently the quality has been dwindling. I can provide many examples of their new flimsy plastic PCI slot covers breaking or not working properly.) For myself I would never again go with a mass-produced computer.
Apparently this has already been denied by Dell:
6 9623.htm
http://web.mid-day.com/news/nation/2003/november/
Quotes from this version:
"He (Dell spokesman Jon Weisblatt) said Dell has no plans to scale back resources at the Bangalore call center or change employment plans in the United States, although he would not comment on specifics."
"Worldwide, Dell employs about 44,300 people. About 54 percent are located abroad."
"Dell Inc. has stopped routing corporate customers to a technical support call center in Bangalore, India."
If you remove the corporate spin it means the following:
DELL is not getting rid of their foreign tech support center.
DELL employs more people overseas than it does it the US.
Business clients will get customer service in the US. Individuals are still going to suffer with foreign support. (Probably more so to make up for Corporations not using foreign support)
I know my next computer will NOT be a Dell!
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
Yeah, I have never bought a big name PC for myself, I always build them... But for friends/family, I don't have the time to be their tech support... So I wish I had someone good to suggest for Home users. For corporate it's Dell all the way, except we (naturally) prefer IBM laptops.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
The problem comes when: 1) the accent and grasp of language is so poor that communication is nearly impossible; and 2) the quality of the support itself is wretched. My mom's DVD recorder was on the blink a few months ago, so I called tech support. I got a lady from India who: could not be understood; sounded as if she were falling asleep (her phrases kept trailing off, followed by a long silence); and beyond reading me a standard boilerplate text, was absolutely useless in telling me what was wrong.
Now, I'm sure this woman was just trying to make a living, and I have nothing against her. This kind of "support," while inexpensive, is worthless.
But what about programming jobs? The company my dad works for has been farming out programming to India for 2 years now and it's just not working out. The time difference makes communication difficult, the code they get back is buggy and inefficient (even simple SQL stuff), they often completely ignore the requirements (code doesn't do anything like what it's supposed to do), and they have yet to get anything back in a reasonable amount of time. This kind of thing can't keep going, folks.
HP laptops are better than what they used to be, but the best experience we've had has always been with IBM Thinkpads. Some people claim they're ugly, but the simple functional black design kinda grows on you. The new T40 or T41 models really make me drool... I'm an AMD guy but the Pentium M really is sweet.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Well, it don't make me no nevermind. Hell, Ize just 'bout to spank this puppy into overdrive anyhoo.
Click here or here.
no, it's not, it's an isolated incident. and if you think your white collar job is safe from outsourcing, you're wrong! evolve or die.
* Second post, in Plain Old Text, for easier reading *
Actually, there was nothing that was grammatically incorrect in my previous post. You're more than welcome to disagree with what I had to say.
This has nothing to do with people from the South specifically. It's a question of attitudes. I'm American and am from the West Coast myself and I am not given to blindly supporting views for or against people from any country, including my own.
You sir may have an accent that is perfectly understandable, and more power to you for that. And you are definitely not alone.
Outsourcing is now a reality, like it or not. And you will have to deal with people that are from other countries. Just because you have purchased a product with US Dollars doesn't mean that you HAVE to speak to somebody that uses the same slang as you do.
As long as the other person can speak English clearly, can understand you and solves your problem how does it matter where he/she is based?
I seriously doubt that you'd all get your panties in a bunch if these call-centers were based in England. It's all right to bash Indian call-centers isn't it?
And you poor dumbass, it's a tandoori oven...see, time and again you prove that most Americans cannot spell.
And your post seems to suggest that tech support in the US is not sing-song gibberish and accurate...lol, that's been very different my experience...guess things are particularly bad in Los Angeles.
Gee...I submitted this yesterday with exactly the same title and it gets rejected...hmmm.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I'll stay with white box and bank the over all savings thanks.
If I need a huge number of systems it will be IBM gear.
They do something about open source besides run stupid ads with their "Linux servers" crap.
At least with IBM I'll possibly be talking to some sweet sounding Scott or Irish babe who knows her shit and will have me playing in seconds.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
Dell is denying this rumor.
Maybe she just thinks it's stupid and is trying to train you into not speaking through quotes all the time. No offense meant - but I can't say I blame her.
I just talked to DirecTV's customer support. I could hardly understand the lady. She had a thick Indian accent. She was nice but it was stressful.
I got tired of repeating, "What? Could you repeat that?"
This DirecTV gave me the warm fuzzies for sure.
As if anyone give s a damn what I think on this matter, I did NOT like it.
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR!
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Banff is pretty much ruined these days. Too much development. Time to head up north into the Yukon or beyond.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Even so, it has one of the best city names I've heard. "Banff!" It's like one of those action sounds from the old Batman TV show.
[insert witty quote here]
we just got out of a multi mullion dollar contract because they failed to provide timely support over a 3 month period. Sadly they chose HP as a replacement and while there support centers may speak better english the hardware is CRAP CRAP CRAP....Compaq used to be solid at least, at a premium price but decent, now the stuff they send out is awful, mis-wired drive cages, mis-matched CPU's, low quality high failure rate and outrageous prices...go corporate america go...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
McManagers with McMBA's
It's funny cuz it's true
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
I work for a large grocery company in Texas, and am one of their Dell Certified Technicians. This means I get to call the Dell Premier Access line, which is absolutely excellent. Basically they know I know what I'm doing, and will take "my word" most of the time after just a little troubleshooting. Likewise they get us the part the next day, no matter what.
However, Premier Access does not support everything. I've recently had to call about the Dell A940 all-in-one printers, which are CRAP (Lexmark made), and have gotten Indian support. It took 45 minutes one day for them just to tell me it was a bad ink cartridge, even after I switched it with another and it worked!
I think part of the problem also is not that they cannot speak English. Most that I have spoken with speak realtively good English. I think the real problem is that they learned English from ENGLISHMEN. This means not only do they have a Hindi accent, but an British accent on top of it.
Several decades ago, American phone companies started centralizing their "information", typically in rural midwestern places where the accent wasn't as deviant (;-) as in the even cheaper South. A real problem ever since then has been the odd pronunciation of many place names, which the phone-company people generally can't guess.
This is partly because of all the place names taken from abo/native/Indian languages. But not entirely. Thus, here in New England, we have towns like Reading, pronounced as if it were "Redding". I grew up in the Seattle area (which I've heard pronounced "seat"+"ull" by Easterners). One of the fun place names there is Puyallup, (mis)pronounced by the locals as "pyu-Al-up".
Sometimes this causes serious problems when trying to communicate with the phone-company person. They just can't map your pronunciation to anything in their database, and you can't guess how they expect place names to be mispronounced. My wife is from the Hudson River valley, where there are a lot of place names pronounced in ways that really surprise outsiders. But the locals think that's how they are pronounced, and are really upset when the phone-company person thinks there's no such town.
There has been a bit of a move away from this centralization on the part of some phone companies. They also have software that can take a semi-phonetic spelling and match it (sometimes). But it's still an ongoing problem.
Possibly the wierdest example was when I called an Arizona info line and asked for a person in Phoenix ("fee"+"nicks"). The person on the other end couldn't find that town in her listing.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Dell will actually pick up the phone?
Last year, I had to move our company away from using anything Dell as while they were moving their support overseas I couldn't get a single person in their 'support' department to pick up the phone. Everytime I would have a customer service person transfer me I would have to wait on hold for half an hour then I would be disconnected by Dell, or get a message saying 'We are having technical difficulties' , disconnected again.
What was frustrating is that I couldn't even take advantage of that really expensive support contract we paid for on our servers. 3 months later and they still never picked up the phone.
I used to work right next to a Dell support team, at Stream Int. in Beaverton, OR (oh my gawd, I think I just violated my NDA ;)
They really weren't very good technicians. Stream mostly just hired people off of the street, and the biggest qualification needed was knowledge of a couple of dos commands. Level one calls were mostly scripted anyway, and they had managers on thier backs constantly about how long they were on their calls (15 minute average call time, or you are fired.)
They were paid a shitty wage, about 10.00$ an hour, which is more than some of them deserved.
That being said, I'm not any more hopeful for the quality of support that will come from the USA than I would be if it came from India.
It's good to see jobs coming back, though.
Just wait until companies figure out the cold truth: Software written overseas is available to any company with the cash and not just the one who actually paid to develop it. If you have a product going out the door next quarter and somebody pays you out-sourcing company more to get it next month, there is absolutely nothing your company can do about it, short of getting the US government to send a cruise missile their way. Zero pressure can be applied to any offshore company which is as heavily entangled with thier governements as those in China and India. Your company's hopes of gettin ANY redress are purely based upon what stage their respective governemtns are at in regards to aquiring technological leverage in the world market. Currently there are at least fifty development centers in those regions which share sources from current outsourcing production without regard to corporate security or interest.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
Convincing them to look up your address in
Chicago, California is fun!
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.
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 it because 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 that
you came to me?
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?
Does it bother you that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper
centers around the world does not result in customer appreciation and
better quality?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I administer ~250 dell pc's. Service calls handled by "foreign" accented individuals
have been concise, clear, timely & accurate. Every time. I would rather
patiently spell out specific names & addresses &
have them correct than not.
Yesterday I called to get a replacement hard drive
& was helped by a distinctly "American" accented
individual. He was obtuse, not focused, seemingly distracted & indifferent.
Great
I'm just waiting for "...would you like fries with that order?"
I am also a foreign student in the US currently. And I've changed my usage of common phrases because of similar incidents. While some of the responses from the American counterparts seemed exaggerated in the article, I often have to repeat myself (2-3 times sometimes..) when I use my Indianised phrases. This feels slightly embarassing for me and probably other first time visitors. Which is probably why most Indian students that I know of adapt to these new phrases almost immediately.
I just had to call today to about display flakiness on my almost year-old iBook. Not only could I understand the American tech perfectly, he actually listened to my description of the problem and adjusted his responses accordingly instead of just sticking to the script like the Dell people did the last time I had to call them about a client issue.
After he made sure I tried a few things, he agreed with my assessment that the it was a hardware problem, and arranged for the box to be shipped to my office.
No fuss, no muss, and no ridiculously convoluted phone tree to get to him in the first place, either. And the hold time was less than 5 minutes.
~Philly
Eglish will be improved by two ways: (1) hiring local Indian stuff with better English, and (2) hiring willing to move to India grown-ups from USA, Canada, UK and Australia (I know already people who moved there from UK and USA and they make pretty good living there).
The quality of scripts will be imporved partially by moving to "scriptless" cases of support scenario - multi-level support lines with appropriate skills on each level.
Both improvements will require better skills, which will demand more salary, but that will be still nothing comparing to US salaries. So, I doubt Bangalore has any problems in long-term.
By the way, visiting several computer shops and ISPs across North America (pay attention: visiting, not calling!) I have discovered many cases when their support people (often Indian immigrants too) had very thick accient (we barely understood each other - talking alive, not by phone!) and they have tried to direct our discussion into pre-scripted line without even trying to hear about my real specific issue (hardware incompatibility, Linux, advanced graphics, advanced audio, Internet and many other simple and complex subjects). So, now what? Send back to India all Indian immigrants?
Less is more !
Just the opposite here, recommend dell for the home and have had great quality and minimal service. Few HD's but blame that on Maxtor or whoever's name is on the label...
I lived in Japan for 9 years. I have no idea what you mean about the culture there not promoting eye contact. If anything, Japanes people are very eager to immerse themselves in close, productive meetings. Not only do they make eye contact, they tend to move very close and actually listen.
Face-to-face meetings are very much in vogue in Japan, when they have a choice in the matter.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
I seriously cannot understand a damm thing the Dell support people say, so i've been telling all my customers that Dell computers are good but come with no support at all.
Emails are also a waste of time, most of the time i don't think they read the email, its more like a script that picks out keywords, even when you've replied a number of times trying to clarify.
I've complained strongly to them a number of times, i'm supprised they actually read the complaints and i didn't simple get an email back saying "ok, computers is five good yes ok?"
They certainly put one over on you....must be an English teacher that 'thinks' they experienced the real Japan.
Let me guess, when you asked, in a meeting, if anyone had any questions, they nodded and said shook their heads 'no'... Too bad you wasted nine years of their time.
.... when he's never even used the same model himself. What was Dell thinking handing out scripts to illiterate mud people in some third world mud hole of a country working for $1.00 per day? Shame on Dell, despicable greedy penny pinching scumbags. I will never buy from Dell again!
...when they get desparate for jobs. All those taxes go out the window for the sake of a few jobs. I know of at least one Tech support firm that's outsourced to Canada because of the deals the local gov. cut 'em. The trick is you have one place in India and one in Canada to handle all the people the Inidans piss off.
And there's a lot of things American companies should do that they won't. Nationalism is dead (except for the poor and ignorant, who will continue to be fed the line to keep them happy and working hard). This is Globalism, and it sucks for everybody except the very rich.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"an onslaught of complaints from dissatisfied customers who couldn't cope with the differing accents"
Typical bloody yanks - can't handle any non US accents. Thats why they take perfectly good english language foreign TV shows and movies and remake them into crap
Add a me too here. HD broke Fri PM, tech arrived Monday AM with replacement.
If you develop the code in house, you can keep parts of it as trade secrets. Furthermore, if you pay your own developers well, they won't be leaving when the economy improves.
If you pay someone else to develop your custom software, exspecially someone else in a foreign country, chances are you have no control over where they use that software again.
I work for Convergys, one of the biggest customer management/contact center companies in the world. (Or so we're led to believe) We've got a couple call centers in India. I remember when the one in New Delhi opened. They started off doing tech support chat for one of our contracts (AT&T Broadband, I think it was) and I remember the stupidest thing was that all the agents' customer viewable names were extremeley sterotypical American names, like Bob, Bill, and Jake. (I always thought this to be insulting, and always refered to their real names when corresponding with them.) Some time ago, the New Delhi center stopped doing chat. I'm not sure what they're doing now.
This isn't limited to Dell. In fact, poor as Dell's home user support is - they're *still* better than most.
Try buying an e-Machines sometime, or maybe a Gateway or an HP, and see what you get!
The PC has become a commodity item, and manufacturers don't care to give you any more tech. support on them than you'd get from your next microwave oven or cordless phone purchase.
This is why "buy a Mac" still makes some real sense. The Mac is about the only "non-comodity" machine geared for home/small business users. Apple considers their products a "premium, niche market alternative", and it shows in the increased build quality, engineering, and customer support.
Unfortunately, most folks want to "have their cake and eat it too", so they refuse to pay more for a Mac, up-front, and keep searching for the non-existant "holy grail" of bargain-basement priced PCs with awesome customer support and quality.
Quite frankly, it is the MBA beancounters who say to their boss, "Hey look, we can cut development costs by a large amount." They are just trying to get ahead, and the stock market kinda forces middle management to concentrate only on the figures for next quarter.
Indian English, OTOH, is more than an accent, it's a self-sustaining dialect; loads of words from Indian languages get absorbed into the English lexicon even if the words are not often used outside India ('ek dum', 'gherao', 'bandobust', 'bandh', 'bandicoot' come to my mind). Tagalog-English (Tinglish?) doesn't have that measure of acceptability just as yet; I guess it'll improve once we get more quality Filipino-English literature or something.
In fact, I often find myself using different nuances while speaking with Indian friends and with international friends in English; my accent is more or less same, but I definitely use a different word-set. I haven't heard any (Americanised) Indian call center folks speak, so it'll be extremely interesting to see what sort of effect this call-center business will have on Indian English.
More than mere navel gazing.
bound to happen. the Indian people have been bureaucratized to such an extent that anybody in any official position will almost always try his/her best to harass the customer. The the prompt and courteous replies one gets in the west are non-existant in India. it's a nightmare when one goes to get the tax returns, inquire about overshot utility bills, incorrect amounts deposited in the bank. Make a small mistake in the form, and the clerk will grill you. you forget to mail in your credit card cheque for the first time in six years, and nobody will give you a one time amnesty. on the other hand, they will he happy to dig out more obscure rules and tell you how your penalty is 1000Rs, instead of the 800Rs stated in your statement. It's no wonder that these people 'treat' their overseas customers in the same way. Those customers are not used to such behaviour, and naturally, they get pissed off. After returning to India, even I get pissed off, talking to the call centres that handle local customers like me.
Those aren't at the top of my list for unaccented speech, enunciation, good grammar...
"Awl raht suhr, kin yew, lahk, cleeick awun yer Cuhstumahs buhttin, an' wheyun thuh wiyunda uhpeyurs, teyul me whut it sayus."
I had the joy of calling Dell in regards to the easy access sound buttons not working on an Inspiron 8500. (e.g. volume control, mute, etc.)
; en-us;174091
THANK U
DIANA
First Call:
- spoke with agent
- she told me to turn off the computer
- very long pause, hello, hellow.... eventually a response!
- asked to remove the battery, 5 minutes later, put the battery back in.......
(it goes on like this -- I'd rather not put you through the agony!)
- eventually, she said she spoke with a manager, and had a solution, and was going to e-mail the fix out, said I'd wait until I got the message, refused to describe the fix, they hung up on the call.
Here's the e-mail:
HI THIS DIANA FROM DELL TECHNICAL SUPPORT
I AM SENDING U ALINK REGARDING THE SOUND BUTTON http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
The information in this article applies to:
* Microsoft Access 97 (WTF?!?!)
It ended up being a connector for the buttons under one of the trim pieces wasn't fully inserted. THE SUPPORT CALL TOOK AN HOUR AND A HALF FOR A FEW REBOOTS!!! (This is with extra "CompleteCare" service")
Case in point: There are many brilliant Indian programmers and support staff, but equally as many incompetent ones.
Dell overestimated the capacity of its Indian call center when it made the decision to divert U.S. customers to the new support service.
"A lot of [the customers] were moved in one go and that was where some of the complaints had arisen so what they've looked at doing is moving some back and then moving them off in smaller increments," said a spokeswoman
I recently bought a laptop though. And although it is possible to roll your own, I couldnt do anything even remotely econimically feasable, or as small/pretty as the prebuilt ones, so I settled for a gateway.
Luckily, I've been quite impressed with the machine so far (works flawlessly in linux), but had to contact tech support about opengl not working and directx being flakey (both in xp). They told me basically that it was something I installed, and I should use the recovery cd to reimage the machine. I thought this was interesting, as I figured the machine was pretty fresh after having it for all of 36 hours. All I had installed was Mozilla Firebird and neverwinter nights. No big loss, just no win vs. nix graphics benchmarks.
But the point I've been skipping around was that tech support essentially told me that "that shouldnt happen" and it was "something you've [I] installed". Naturally, the former was something I knew, which was the whole reason for emailing them in the first place. I'll admit this wasnt over the phone tech support, and could have very well been answered in north america. However, I don't think the tech thought for more than two or three seconds before formulating his answer.
Maybe tech was shipped overseas because the quality offered here wasnt worth the extra cash. Again, I'll point out this is more-or-less my first experiences with tech support, but it's just the idea that popped into my head
-- Seq
I worked for a partner of one odf the largewt finanacial failures of the past 10 years. With a dwindling budget and not enough time, this company hired an indian software houe to develop a large portion of the code to run the infrastructure. it came back completely out of spec. They had to ire consultants to fix it. End result - it cost more and took longer. In my current position with Fortune 100 company, much of the software development is done offshore. It's crap. These jobs will come back eventually.
Everything isn't hunky-dory as it seems here in Bangalore, India. I am a CISSP with almost four years of professional experience and am working in one of the top-most software firms in India.
What work am I doing? Taking tech support calls for Windows & Outlook-related problems for a US firm! The thing is employees here are suffering as well because of these lucrative out-sourcing contracts My company simply cannot find any better margin consulting project!
I mean... C'mon! That's such a no-brainer!
--- root@127.0.0.1
We lost a bid against an outsourcer because the potential client didn't see the need to pay to have requirements written down. The project was vague enough that we couldn't bid it without a phase one "interview the users and establish use cases". I seriously doubt that the outsourcerers were going to be able to divine this client's requirements either. But whatever they built was going to be cheap!
with that service contract. I wonder how people would feel if the "service" person at the other end was French and could barely speak English.
A medical claims subcontractor in Pakistan already threatened to post Social Security numbers on the internet unless the hospital paid her because her contractor stiffed her. A folowup article estimated that at least 20% of medical records work is outsourced abroad threw subcontrating chains. Important identity info is rampant in medical records.
Yes, even the Texan Cyberpunk chairman Brice Sterling now blogs away in a militaristic manner. Seem like sufficiently heavy weapons will solve any problem:
A: Here is a big bomb
Q: How do I get rid of top posters?
This is probably less about subject matter than about call centers. Typically, personnel in a call center are poorly paid and poorly informed about the subject matter (pears and plants are basically the core materials of my experience) and worse-informed (and -served) by whatever computer/software system involved...and I seem to recall a study indicating that this is probably THE highest-stress job outside of emergency services. Because companies want to pay poorly, they also oddly enough get either poorly-motivated people or those who have psychological problems--in my case, for instance, PTSD. (Sidenote: being aware of a problem DOESN'T necessarily mean you can change it significantly.) As far as IT personnel getting in on things, this is always mediated by a pyramidal structure of authority and thus the 'end product'--customer service, say--has been translated by those who aren't IT types and couldn't be (well, one hopes; complete idiots are the type I mean). More than that, this is an age where information-access is valued in and of itself as a privilege, which means that someone with a fishy eye would be looking at any script provided by IT types to make sure that not too much information will be given to anyone, whether employee or customer. At which point I'd hardly dare name the company...publicly. Some idiot oregonnerd@hotmail.com might, though. 8]
oregonnerd...a nerd in Oregon, of course
1) Become an outsourcing consultant.
2) Preach outsourcing.
3) Profit !!!
And when that fad goes Ack! Phfft!!
1) Become in insourcing consultant.
2) Preach doing it in-house.
3) Profit !!!
As an occasional visitor to the USA, I have to say how frustrating it is trying to communicate with people who can't understand anything but a mid-USA accent.
Maybe its time you lot realised there's a whole other world out there, and try to communicate with it. Other people deserve to eat too.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
I don't really get upset by the accents, but the scripted and limited knowledge of some call centers is frustrating. US call centers aren't perfect either, they need more intelligent people on the lines and need to answer them quickly.
:-)
Cisco is a good example. You call in, speak with a "tech" all he does is take your name, info and number, they ask you what the priority is, and have an engineer call you back in 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes. Depending on the severity of your complaint. I've had to use their tech support 3 times and every time it was a pleasure. Menial technical issues were called back in 10 to 15 minutes, even though they said it would be about 20 - 30 minutes. The engineer had an accent, but who cares? I got my problem solved in a very pleasant manner by an intelligent person in a timely manner.
Dell should talk to Cisco
I asked the tech what he thought the problem was, and I told him what my suspicion was. I asked him to send a tech with the replacement hardware out to simply swap out the parts. Instead, he transfered us to ANOTHER tech guy, who made my friend go through the whole damn mess again. This was apparently third level support, which I believe in Dell-parlance means a native English speaker rather than an indicator of skill level. In the end, the guy had a tech come out to swap out the parts. I visited my friend's business the next day only to discover the idiot had replaced the wrong part. Fortunately, he had left the original part there so I was able to do the correct swap.
Anyways, it's hard to imagine how Dell can save any money by angering and frustrating my friend. But, curiously he asked me whether or not he should renew his soon-to-expire warranties with Dell. After seeing what he had just gone through, I admit being a little incredulous at first. Then, it dawned on me that my friend lived in a practical world, whereas I was coming from a somewhat idealized point of view (you know, vote with your wallet and such...). After all, where was he going to find anything different from Dell at a similar cost? I knew that one of the reasons he had asked me about continuing the warranty with this company after a frustrating experience was because he felt "safe" that I could bail him out of Dell's mismanagement.
I asked him how much would it cost to re-insure all his computers, and after making a few phone calls to Dell, the amount came out to three times the cost of a single new computer. I told him to save his money, and get a spare Dell of the same model and stick it in the closet for parts. It would save him three times the cost in parts replacement under warranty. If he didn't want to do that, he could simply order another Dell when he needed it, pay a little extra for next day delivery and still save over half on the cost of warranty.
= 9J =
Is hoping that the U.S. Government caters to American interests going to be considered "xenophobic" too?