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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.
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
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
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!
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.
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.
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'
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Every few support calls I get an email from Dell asking me to fill out a survey. On a recent one I complained about the poor quality of support I had received. After dealing mainly with the people from the server support division the complete lack of clue and ability was very, very obvious. Good to know companies still listen to their consumers. Seems obvious, but many don't.
I was talking with a woman yesterday who said she was getting very bad service from HP's support system. But she never complained to anyone. We as consumers must remember that if we just idly accept whatever the corporates throw at us this is the kind of treatment to expect. I can't speak for the rest of the world but here in America the desire for the absolute cheapest solution possible is slowly killing us. We complain about poor service, no help, etc. but then we go shop at the Super Mega Mart because their product is 5 cents cheaper.
Sorry for the vent. My point is, we need to vote with our money and complain to the management when things are not how we want them.
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).
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.
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
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.
> 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...
Most companies I call give me someone in the USA that I can't understand. It's nothing to do with IT; it's the crappy pay scale and the sociology of who gets the crappy-paying jobs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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();
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
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
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
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.
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?'.
>> '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?
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.
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
Apparently this has already been denied by Dell:
6 9623.htm
http://web.mid-day.com/news/nation/2003/november/