Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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'
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
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).
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?
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
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.
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.
Actaully the opensource car machanic isn't that far off. Not the machanic but the diagnostic codes and workshop manuals. Car makers have been pricing those so only the dealer can afford them where as the independent shop can't. Only recently has the courts started forcing them to be reasonable.
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."
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
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?
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
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.
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
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
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!
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.
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
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
For one, you're ignoring time differences. There's also more to working with foreign teams than accents. Not being able to walk down the hall and grab some people to hash out an issue and get some face-time is important too.
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?
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!
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.
I'm not ignoring anything. I've done this very scenario for years. 'face time' can be a Western concept. Offset hours are no different than swing shift. You seem to be stuck in a box, and that kind of thinking risks you being left behind. Jobs have been moving abroad for years and they will continue to do so. You can learn to manage remote or go with them...adapt or die.
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
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.
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.
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?'.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, you should learn a bit of their concepts and their language....works for me. Japanese, Korean, Mandarin/Cantonese, Indian & Malay.
It's not easy, so don't get me wrong. And it's not for everyone. But again, to survive, we all need to adapt at one point or another. I enjoy managing Indians/Malasians etc. remote, but some days you dread opening email or answering the phone, when it seems like the people on the other end are just never going to get it. But once they do, and all the hassles are behind you, there is great pleasure (and good pay) in remote projects....an E ticket.
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
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.
>> 'face time' can be a Western concept.
Face time is not a 'western' concept. Since when is human interaction and body language 'western'?
Since when is grabbing a sheet of copy paper and a pencil to draw a diagram 'western'?
I don't think that these concepts keep me in a box. As a matter of fact, the teams of people that I'm working with in India and Japan agree that the lack of face time is a serious problem with the offshore model.
How to reduce the problem? We're spending more time up front making VERY precise functional requirements documents. Now that we're into tech design, this has helped. Now we're looking for precise technical specs. Trying to replace body language and "you know what I'm trying to say right?" with precise english.
And even though it's hell for my personal life (my wife is a saint), talking to these guys every day at midnight and 7:00AM keeps the communication flowing.
Personally I hate the offshore model. But I have to learn to work with it, somehow. Either the model will stay, and I'll know how to package work and manage it. Or it will fail horribly(my preference) and I'll still have better management and requirements gathering skills to continue my career.
wbs.
Huh?
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.)
We're in the PC hardware business. What is this "quality" you speak of?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
I just spent 4 hours on hold with these guys... When I called, I knew the SCSI controller was shot. I have a hard time believing that all the disks in a system would start failing simultaniously.. Sure, it could happen, but... Anyhow, back when the tech support was still in Round Rock I could get past the BS pretty quickly... These guys just kept giving me the same scripted crap.. After 4 hours, they agreed to replace it.
BTW, did I mention I'm running FreeBSD on this system... Apparently, they've never heard of that in India.. Not that I care..
tech: What OS are you running?
me: FreeBSD..
tech: Windows 2000?
me: FreeBSD..
me: UNIX!! Give me a new #$%@!*# motherboard!!
Grrrr.....
So, my question... Is the PowerEdge stuff coming back to the US?
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
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.
In this country, even the clearest mildest foreign accent elicits reactions of "he doesn't even speek English."
My college roommate was from Sri Lanka. At one point, she called relatives in California, collect. Just getting the phone number verified was an extensive process, involving much repeating on her part.
After the conversation, she asked me if I thought her accent was really that bad. No, I explained, the problem was, she was in Oklahoma, and she was speaking far too *clearly*.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
"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
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
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
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 :)
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.
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?
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
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.
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
Apparently this has already been denied by Dell:
6 9623.htm
http://web.mid-day.com/news/nation/2003/november/
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 \.
Actually, they did use enums.
I never liked STL. It's extremely cryptic and not object-oriented, it's a kludge to work around limitations in the language, gaining efficiency at the cost of being confusing. Given my druthers, I'd rather use my own tools, but at least the MFC collection classes are easily understandable.
Believe me, I threw out some ideas that just got blank stare. Even the simple ideas rocked the boat. When questioned why I used Hungarian notation (a name that my supervisor thought was some kind of joke), no explanation I could give could convince her there was any value to it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.
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.