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Outsourced Call Centers Losing Feasibility?
Daniel Pronych writes "BusinessWeek is running an article about how outsourcing call centers in India are no longer an 'inexpensive option' for American companies. These shops are now striving for better outsourced work from the U.S. and Europe multinational companies; many are fed up with U.S. clients trying to continually lower prices. New Delhi-based EXL Services, for example, terminated a contract with Dell Inc. because EXL was losing money in the deal."
I work at a Canadian office of an outsourcing company that opened offices in India.
I've actually had a conversations start with "Finally, someone in North America.", "Great, a Canadian. Better you than India." and many other anti-offshore statements.
And that's not even getting into some of the rather rude comments that people make towards our Indian coworkers. I especially feel sorry for immigrants from India/Pakistan/etc. who are IN Canada, but get treated just as badly as if they were IN India.
And of course, I've dealt with India call centers as a caller. While I'm patient towards them because I know exactly what they have to go through, I'm less than satisfied with the level of service I get sometimes. I'm not surprised in the slightest that India firms are ramping up their rates.
Oh, and something interesting I've found out recently, is that there are also some firms opening up in Latin America. Why? Because they can support English and Spanish.
I work in one of the six main utility companies in the UK. We've just taken the decision to return all our work in house, from India. The reason we've done this is mainly that outsourcing doesnt work, but is also because we're moving away from a command and control environment where the work is broken down into small amounts and processed ad infinitum by the worker, which made outsourcing so attractive. We're moving to a system thinking/lean model like Toyota's production line being the main example. The, i've got 200 workers that can do 2000 units of work at $x amount means that there are targets in the system. Once you get targets you're defining that once they've done 2000units of work they are effective and its even better when we can get the work done cheaper. Problem is that those 2000units of work havent been done effectively. They've been fudged, the ticket has been resolved for instance but the actual customers problem hasnt so they'll raise 4,5,6,7 tickets all 'resolved' each time as a unit of work for the outsource, making the management happy by meeting the target but the customer is still pissed off and has taken there custom else where as they've never resolved the problem. The trick is to look at how the work works and improve the system. not break it down into a series of units and whore it to the cheapest bidder. Once you improve the system you can view what work is waste and value. IE one office receives a number of bits of paper staples whacks them in an envelope and sends them to another office where they employ someone to take the staples out. Why staple it? turn off that bit of work and free that employee to actually look at that work and work it. Yes, i've been sold on it, but then again it actually works. In 12months we've gone from 90% above average for customer complaints to 60% below average and have overtaken most of our rivals and our catching the rest up. Not only that moral in the company has really improved too. Personally my little rant doesnt do justice to how well its working and will continue to work for us.