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

[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

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: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.