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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
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.
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'
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).
Oh. Wait.
All parts of Canada are irrelevant.
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
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."
>> '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?