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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?"
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.
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).
There will always be lots of back and forth between those who want the software written, and those who are writing it.
I was reading an article in either an IEEE magazine or an ACM magazine not too long ago, and the authors claimed that outsourced software might be of higher quality precisely because of the absence of back and forth that's around in-house. Management (or whoever wants the software written) is forced to spend more time defining requirements properly before handing them over to the programmers.
There are really two separate issues: 1. Management doesn't tell the programmers what they really want in the software, and 2. Management doesn't actually know what they really want in the software. If #1 is the dominant problem, then outsourcing might get you better software because the requirement docs might be better on average, but if #2 is the dominant problem, then outsourcing might get you worse software because there isn't enough feedback getting back to management.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
If you're certain of the answer, the best thing to do is simple say you tried "a known good" AC adapter or whatever and it worked. Almost all of the Dell support trees have an option for "tested with known good" and the solution is, duh, replace the part. Calls like that we could wrap up in 2-3 minutes.
Link to article.
Apparently this has already been denied by Dell:
6 9623.htm
http://web.mid-day.com/news/nation/2003/november/