The Hidden Cost of Outsourcing

Alien54 writes to tell us CNNMoney is reporting that outsourcing may not be as big of a bargain as some might think. From the article: "With consumers enjoying more choice than ever before, evidence is growing that great service is essential for long-term customer retention. To cite just one example, a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service."

Comments

Some companies are already ahead of the game

[AnotherDaveB]

From the article, "you'll soon figure out that competing solely on price is a fool's game"

Quote below taken from DNUK's website

The DNUK Advantage

• We currently offer all the major GNU/Linux distributions on our systems; including Debian, Fedora, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE and White Box
• Unlike other system builders we offer all GNU/Linux distributions at no charge with our systems and we also sell the retail boxed products as an option
• We can offer a degree of customisation for our customers that the large OEMs simply cannot match
• We pride ourselves on our customer support - all our technicians are experienced with GNU/Linux support
• Customers can communicate directly with the very same technicians that built their systems
• We do not use offshore support departments in India!

Re:Dollar is king

[twiddlingbits]

You obviously have not been paying attention. Dell caught hell for lousy customer service outsourcing to India, and they saw repeat Sales drop. They have since moved a lot of the call centers back to the USA. If you want CHEAP go with Dell, but if you are a business beware the consequences. If you want ultra-reliable machines with enterprise level features then you need Sun or IBM servers, or the DL series from HP.

India is a great place for development,as they have very skilled programmers for cheap wages and "tech speak" has less problems with the language barriers than customer service.