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

No shit sherlock

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:No shit sherlock

[jo42]

Yes, but some fumbducktard MBA decided that you need a college degree to follow a script to deal with support issues.

Have you ever tried to call one of these help desks -- and get any real help? You're better off wacking yourself over the head with a 2x4 repeatedly.

Re:No shit sherlock

[Frosty Piss]

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

That may be so, but American companies that contract with Indian outsource firms are *certainly* paying more than that.

Re:No shit sherlock

[hawguy]

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

That may be so, but American companies that contract with Indian outsource firms are *certainly* paying more than that.

And American companies that pay their call center agents $10/hour are still billing them out for more than that to account for benefits and overhead (including agent training, facilities, administration, etc). But since nearly everything is cheaper in India, the final bill rate for an Indian call center agent still ends up being less than an American call center agent.

Re:No shit sherlock

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the point.

Indians will work for pennies on the dollar. Hell you can outsource to Canada for cheaper than the US and not get the entire culture/accent barrier. Trust me worked in a outsourced call center, twice. My jobs got sent to India and the Philippines.

As a native English speaker, I can certainly attest to the amount of abuse Americans hurl at those they suspect of not being American. Canadians don't get nearly as much abuse unless they sound Indian or Asian. There were representatives who came from the Arab world with weak accents who get subjected to so much racist shit because of 9/11.

If you, as a business owner, want to outsource here's some simple rules to keep everyone happy:
1. Outsource only non-core business. Customer Support and Technical Support are core businesses in ALL businesses that offer a service.
2. Outsource only material that if it fell into a criminal's hands, they would be unable to use. So for example you should NEVER outsource billing/payments. Because companies like Verizon and AT&T run credit, they should absolutely NOT be doing this from outsourced centers, since stealing the data is worth almost 10 years worth of pay. Much of this problem is how SSN's are used as part of phone authentication process, and americans don't even question it. If a government policy banning the use of SSN's for ALL non-IRS purposes, many companies would be up shit creek.
3. Outsource non-core work. So for example if your company has a website that doesn't have customer interaction, you can probably outsource this. As soon as a credit card is required, this work must be done in-house. Outsource basic customer support to in-house forum systems (eg your customers are also your customer support) and then just employ in house staff to make sure things stay sane.

One of the most frequent problems I notice, is how understaffed companies become once they outsource. This is because they try to replace inhouse staff with outsourced staff on a 1:1 ratio when this isn't anywhere near the requirement.

Your in-house staff likely has experience, or training with your products and services first hand. Your outsourced support staff only has documentation to work from. When I worked for the mobile phone company, they provided us with exactly one mobile phone... for the entire call center of 500 people. And since they don't provide service here, we couldn't even use the phone for any level of troubleshooting. There were countless times where simply having the equipment available would have been useful. They could have setup a pico-cell inside the call center so that troubleshooting could be done directly on the network and not having to relay through several layers of people. So if you're paying one US citizen 20$/hr to do this, they may be the first and last contact. But when you're paying someone in Canada, India, China, whatever, 1/3rd or less (The going rate in Canada is upwards of 12$/hr) you end up needing three or four times as many staff because the staff are unable to troubleshoot problems because they aren't in the customers location. Basically anytime you have a technical problem with a mobile device, you're much better off taking it to the company owned store (more on that in a moment) and having them call dealer customer support using the internal number that bypasses the outsourced centers.

Also I worked the warranty exchange queue for business. That was a load of fun. Now remember what I said above about being better off taking devices to a company owned store? Well some people don't know the difference between a dealer and a company owned store. So you get lots of people who buy the most profitable phone for the dealer, calling in when the device breaks, and being told to return it to the dealer. The problem is that dealers make commission, so if you return a device, they lose their commission. So they will pretty much waste your time or charge you a fee for returning the item. Some of them get told to do a warranty exchange... even when the device i

Re:No shit sherlock

[msauve]

I'd rather get support from a HS grad who knows the product, than someone with a masters in anthropology, who doesn't.

Skill Requirements

[ThatsMyNick]

Perhaps, that is all the skills that is required for the job. Just like car mechanics, IT support is becoming less and less of a highly skilled job.

Re:Skill Requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it isn't. It's still a highly skilled job, it's just that we've moved the title and position further from the end users. Those people are called troubleshooters now, and they make good money. (I know, I was one). The "tech support" or better yet, "help desk" positions are nothing but robots reading scripts, and soon enough, they will literally be robots. That doesn't change the fact that in order to actually be HELPFUL they have to know more than how to type.
 
Your standards of service are an affront, please raise them.

Re:Skill Requirements

[couchslug]

"IT support is becoming less and less of a highly skilled job."

Not even close. Auto mechanics requires far MORE skill and broader knowledge of theory than it did forty years ago.

Doesn't surprise me one bit...

[erp_consultant]

Have you ever spoken to these people? I used to work for a big IT company that rhymes with Hell, and they staffed all of their call centers with undertrained, underpaid Indian nationals. One time it took me 5 calls just to get a password changed...and I was on a client site at the time and desperately needed it fixed. Frustration does not even begin to describe how I felt. It's bad enough when you use it for your own internal support but using it for customers paying big bucks for support contracts? Inexcusable. I bet that IBM is working on training monkeys to follow a support script cause, you know, the wages are starting to go up in India and we've got to make our numbers this quarter - damn it!

Re:Big deal?

[Trepidity]

I believe that was typically the case at U.S. call centers too, back when there were more of them. In the late-90s and early-2000s, working helpdesk was a common way for techies without degrees to make some money (either to help pay for college, or just to pay rent).

Inflammatory title of course

[beltsbear]

Inflammatory title of course, it implies that the people manning the desks are in high school or of high school age not just adults that only went to high school.

Re:Inflammatory title of course

[frosty_tsm]

+1

High Schooler != High School Graduate

This isn't shocking

[moogied]

Lets face the facts: 99% of the calls people put into help desks are for a small handful of issues. Even with IBM's wide array of enterprise gear most of it can be broken into a few small trees. From there you keep breaking it down until you get it into a nice neat group. Then you escalate that out to a qualified person.

Most of the calls result in a ticket being created and thats where it stops. It goes out to a qualified person, usually contracted, who fixes it. Indian high schoolers are roughly as well educated as american high schoolers. Meaning they can write, read, and regurgitate information.

Beyond all of that, the lower echelons of IT work is at best blue collar. I know people REALLY want to believe that ghosting an image to 300 desktops is 'hard core' but its not. Kick starting linux servers isn't either. Nor is any other thing that can be easily explained or replicated. Theres a reason those guys get 30k. Its easy work. They just need someone reliable who won't cause problems.

Things get a bit more 'white collar' as you move into sys admin work. A lot of that is still fairly easy, but it has caveats. People who are restarting java app's a few times a day, are clearing out logs, all that crap are still fairly unskilled. Skill starts to pick up you get into work such as fixing servers with crash carts/ilo. When you have a stable server suddenly drop off the network and you log in to fix it. You check SSHD, check network, check uptime, load, all of that... but from there it can go anywhere. What if random commands are throwing odd errors? Oh no! You have entire partitions down! Remounting them isn't fixing it.. so then you start with vgdisplay, etc etc.

Thats when you start earning your money and start really needing people with college *LEVEL* education. (As there is no worth while college degree in sysadmin. Its all very much self taught and then refined through cert programs.)

You Get What They Pay For

[Greyfox]

I worked IBM's support line in the early 90's. The whole cost efficiency question had not yet come up when I started there, and we were the best-rated customer service in the industry. When you called support you went through a screener who took down your info and got a sense of the problem you were having. Based on what you told them, they'd give you a problem number and route you into one of the support buckets. That's where we picked it up and would be the next people on the phone with the customer. The record would already be written up and the screener would have made sure the customer was eligible for support. At the time, IBM was talking about all of us "Level 1 analysts" picking up their "OS/2 Certified Engineer" certification.

Fast forward a few months and they started talking about the cost of the support. Turns out, it cost IBM $30 on average for their screener to answer the phone. That was just the cost of the OS/2 support operation divided by call volume I suppose. So they started cutting costs. First thing to go were the screeners. That meant the support reps were the ones getting the customer's information and verifying that they were eligible for support. The call center also got way more touchy about call times. If you couldn't answer the question in about 10 minutes, they wanted you to requeue for a level 2 analyst call back. No more spending half an hour talking a customer through recovering their desktop. And OS/2 lost its desktop a lot.

They killed the operating system before they had a chance to move that call center to India, but I'm sure that would have been the next step. The fact of the matter throughout the industry is that the support line is populated with meaty paperweights and is designed to encourage you to solve your problem on your own. If you actually have a problem that you can't solve on your own, they'll grudgingly schedule a callback from a level 2 analyst after making you reboot your device. In this way the people you talk to now are like less-able screeners from back in the early IBM support days. They filter out most of the plonkers, do a mediocre job of finding out what your problem is and schedule a callback from a level 2 analyst.

Does that level of skill require a college degree? Not really. Always talking to a guy with a college degree would cost more than most of their customers are willing to pay. I'm sure they'd be happy to negotiate a private support contract with an SLA. It's just a matter of how large of a suitcase of cash you want to give them.

Not just inflation

[rsilvergun]

I've got cleaner water, better health care. Laws that make sure my food isn't poison. I've got a social safety net that keeps bands of thieves and kidnappers to a minimum. My air is also much, much cleaner. Sure, 80% of Indians never have these problems, but for the other 20% life just sucks. America put a lot of effort into closing that gap. For those of us that don't just live a charmed life we want that.

Re:The whole article is bullshit

[sociocapitalist]

Separately, we have a saying in India, which is drilled into the brains of BPO trainees. It says; 10=35. The IQ of an average 10-year old Indian kid is about the same as the IQ of the average 35-yr old American. Reading the many infantile responses to this article, I begin to suspect this might not be far from the truth.

Your post is as immature and offensive as many of the posts seen on here and is, additionally, hypocritical to boot.