Are Indian High Schoolers Manning Your IBM Help Desk?

theodp writes "IBM CEO Virginia M. Rometty's Big Blue bio boasts that she led the development of IBM Global Delivery Centers in India. In his latest column, Robert X. Cringely wonders if customers of those centers know what they're getting for their outsourcing buck. 'Right now,' writes Cringely, 'IBM is preparing to launch an internal program with the goal of increasing in 2013 the percentage of university graduates working at its Indian Global Delivery Centers (GDCs) to 50 percent. This means that right now most of IBM's Indian staffers are not college graduates. Did you know that? I didn't. I would be very surprised if IBM customers knew they were being supported mainly by graduates of Indian high schools.'"

Comments

College not needed...

[cavtroop]

...the problem is, they're not allowed to think for themselves. Education is completely irrelevant - they have to follow the scripts they have in front of them, and not deviate or they get dinged. I know, I've had to write some of these scripts for them (not IBM, but another large multinational co that does outsourced helpdesk work). The last step in any of the scripts is to escalate to Tier 2/3 - which 90% of the time is an actual employee of the company and not part of the outsourced help desk.

So how is having a college educated phone bozo any better than a high school educated one if they're not allowed to deviate from the scripts they're given?

Re:No shit sherlock

[hawguy]

You don't need a college degree to know how to work a phone. I know the HR hysteria in the USA would have you believe otherwise, but trust me! It's not that hard...

But one of the big justifications for outsourcing call centers to India was that you could get college-educated workers for cheap. If you're going to be staffing the call centers with people who have just a high school education, then you might as well do that in the United States and not deal with the language/accent barrier.

You're missing the cheap part -- highschool grads in India are cheaper than high school grads in the USA. That's why they deal with the language/culture/accent barrier.

Workers without a college degree are cheap enough in America as it is.

Pay range for entry level agents in India is $200 - $350/month. Where are these cheap Americans that will work for $1.75/hour?

Moreover, it's strongly implied that IBM is misrepresenting the educational level of the employees in these outsourced call centers. Regardless of whether workers in call centers should need a college degree, it's not kosher to say or imply that your workers do when in fact they don't.

Where is this implied? I never assume that first level tech support agents will have any kind of relevant college degree - they all seem to follow a script (and I wish they'd just publish the scripts online so I could follow them myself).

"High School Graduates", not "High Schoolers"

[billstewart]

"High Schoolers" says that the people manning the help desk are kids who are still in high school. "High School Graduates" implies that they've finished high school but don't have college degrees. There are some help desk jobs for which that's really just fine (as long as they've learned enough English that they can understand the concepts and get some practice with speaking it), and others for which you need a lot of specialized training, much of which depends on concepts you'd learn in college.