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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."
If the call center jobs get moved to the US,etc... will Indians complain about their jobs being outsourced?
In the UK we have had a lot of companies who outsourced their customer care to India, but because of this there has been a real backlash against companies who have done so at the expense of British workers. Now you often see in adverts people advertising that they have UK call centers only. I wonder if it is maybe becoming unworkable for both sides in these deals.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
The funny thing is all of your ideas ARE anti-capitalist. No one is accusing you of being anti-capitalist, you are simply proposing solutions that are anti-capitalist.
Whether capitalism benefits or does not benefit us doesn't make your ideas any more or less capitalist. Just because people will turn to welfare if insurance doesnt exist, doesn't make welfare any less socialist. Welfare is simply one aspect of socialism in the American government. It doesn't make any sense to try and avoid socialism through more socialism. If the law that made tarrifs eliminated welfare then maybe you would have a point.
At least most capitalists have the balls to call their ideas capitalism rather than trying to label socialism capitalism. Just say it, you like socialist policies. I don't in general, but it's a free country so no one is going to put you in the gulag or send you to be reeducated cutting sugar cane if you want to change a law.
I don't need to "flame" you for being anti-capitalist its clear to anyone who can read and knows what capitalism means knows that the state using taxation to redistribute wealth is as anti-capitalist as it comes. Exactly which of your ideas aren't anti-capitalist?
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.
The reason why people don't like outsourced call centres isn't usually because they are in India (however if it has lead to loss of local jobs people dislike that too). It's because things are generally made harder. The people in India aren't generally very good at speaking English, and commonly fail to understand what you are trying to say. They also generally are of little help. If you have a problem, you are either put on hold, or relayed a manual (which you have probably already read). They also are usually rather powerless - there *is* very little they are able to do - they are just made to 'deal' with people - and this just annoys most. Since they usually know so little about the subject you are calling about, working with outsourced call centres is just like flogging a dead sheep. They also probably think the same about dealing with angry customers. It's all about profit now, not customer service, and not about keeping the customer happy. If the customer is unhappy but they stay with the company - then their business model is working. However if you leave the company, you just receive the same level of service elsewhere.
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.
Every new fashion in managment works the same way: short lived fascination and then covering arses of the responsible possibly declaring the whle excercsie as a big success. Downsizingworked the same way (was it not Amtrack that was so successfuly down-sizing that they did not have any body to drive their trains anymore?)
Sombody was talking about silver bullets around here? It looks like one only the silver is faked.