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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.'"
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...
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.
What's the big deal about that? Tier 1 helpdesk doesn't need a degree. A high-school education (even a US one) is more than enough to understand and speak English at a high-school level and follow a script and checklist. You don't need to be a cordon bleu chef to cook burgers at McDonald's either.
If they're required by policy to follow a script, does it matter if they have a degree? I'm more concerned about fluency in english, an understandable accent,quality of the voip connection, and quality of the inter-cubicle sound isolation.
...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?
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!
The term "graduate" means different things in US and India. You can hold a 'diploma' that's 10+3. This 'diploma' isn't considered a graduate in the US. It's not a degree because it's shy of the typical 4 year course structure. It could just mean they have a 3 year 'degree' than a 4 year bachelor's degree. Your assumption is flawed. 1 year of additional education can make a lot of difference if you're a developer or something else, but for a help desk job, I doubt it would add much value. Also, if you have a 4 year degree, why wouldn't you aim for a dev job?
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.
I thought we were supposed to complain about job ads with ridiculous lists of required skills. And if you need a college degree to do PC administration tasks, your OS is in bad shape.
Did you know that 10 years ago, if you called Dell, Gateway, HP, WellsFargo, Netgear, etc etc etc etc, that you spoke to someone making $10.50/hr, who most certainly did not have a college degree, and whom the technical skills test was "here, type this". The only difference now is, those people aren't in the united states, and they don't make anywhere near 10.50$/hr. Then or now, they never had any chance of actually helping you solve a problem.
NDA be damned, Dell had 5 solutions for ANY problem. Is it on. Check. Is it installed correctly. Check. Reformat, does it work now? Check. Does the rest of the computer work without it? Check. Replace it. DONE. This is essentially what all their scripts say. Oh sure, there are minor detailed differences, and some small portion of the people they employ to read the scripts even understand the differences. Most do not, never did and never will. They are paid to go through those scripts AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. They are not paid for your satisfaction, and in fact, you can't commend or condone them in any way, because you don't know if you were talking to 'joe' at Dell's Texas headquarters, 'Joe' at the Beaverton Oregon Call center called Stream, or some other third party call center. You can call to complain, and customer service will no doubt apologize, coddle you and then do absolutely nothing.
One customer always comes to mind when I talk about this issue. She called in over 50 different times. She spoke to as many different people. She went through every script, every troubleshooting guide. Her modem was replaced. 5 times. The motherboard was replaced, twice. The CPU, Memory, hard drive and case were replaced once each. Her ENTIRE computer (include the mouse and cables) was replaced twice. Nothing solved the issue. She called in, and got me. Now, it's 12:30am, I'm quietly handling technical calls for Dell, but I'm in Oregon at STREAM intl. She explains her story, and I look it up. Holly crap, they have done just about everything that can be done... well crap. Tell me what the problem is. "Well, the last tech said..." No lady, I want you to tell me the problem, not what anyone else said it was. "my modem won't stay connected, and often won't connect at all". OK I say... any other issues..."well yeah, I get weird lines on my screen when I try and call out, or if I walk to close while on the phone". Alright, please do something strange for me, just reach down and touch the computer, but watch the screen. "It flashed with snow". OK do you happen to have power lines in your back yard. "yes, how did you know". Lucky guess. I know this isn't reasonable, but I need you to move the whole computer to the opposite side of the house, and call me back at this number xxxxxxxxxxx. She did, and you know what, it fixed the problem. 51+ phone calls, and the problem was outside interference, which isn't on any of the scripts. This isn't a problem of language, or culture, or race, or which country your phone call goes to. It's a problem that "technical support" is neither technical, nor support. Which is why it's mostly called "customer service" now. I think Carlin best described what that means.
They don't want us to realize that the reason college is so important is because children in the U.S. are deliberately prevented from learning anything valuable in their first 13 years of "education".
My dad had a friend in high school who taught shop class. He helped me about 6 years ago with his shop tools. He was forcibly retired a few years later because the administrators decided that woodworking and metal working aren't important to people who are going to college, which is all that matters in a globalized society.
Apparently that's the feedback loop: Grade school gets you ready for middle school, middle school for high school, high school for college, college for graduate school, graduate school for unemployment.
According to a book from the 1970's I found at a thrift shop years ago ("The Screwing of the Average Man"), College used to be something that the upper class sent their children to, so they'd have a leg up on the un-credentialed proletariat. After WWII Congress passed the GI Bill to pacify all those ex-soldiers, and college became affordable for everyone. I was going to say that college is a waste of money, but the real waste is in K-12 - at least in College you mostly take only the classes you care about.
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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.
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"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.
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I'm kind of surprised that they haven't farmed this out to Watson yet.
Why pay for high-school grads, when you can get them less educated? How less educated? Elementary, my dear Watson.
Most of the help desks in the US are manned by people without degrees. There are plenty of people working help desk jobs while working towards a degree also. It’s kind of the new fast food job. The biggest difference between help desk workers with a degree and those without is the ones without don't owe huge student loans. I've seen plenty of people get a degree and stay in the help desk job. One of the biggest problems is if you have a degree and have a help desk job on your resume; employers will say "I see you have help desk experience!"
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I have to support a piece of software and IBM bought the company a few years ago, so when it came time to move to a new version I got to deal with IBM.
I spent 14 hours on the phone trying to get a price for a piece of software, most of the time I was shuttled around support people in India who couldn't help me, I was told that software prices were "restricted information", searching IBM's site for contact numbers got me developer's desk phones and they didn't know why the hell their numbers were posted on IBM's site.
Then I had months of weekly calls from sales people wanting to get a commission.
Try calling for support from a small or medium business. Too small to outsource, their staff is more likely than not to have lots of contact with the people who made the stuff in the first place. You can get good results.
I work at a larger place than that, but instead of the traditional three levels of support we effectively have two - second level and third level, all internal. The people you get on the phone when you call know how to think, and solve 90% of incoming calls (including many tougher calls because problems have escalated before and documentation and training have come down from third level so we don't need to get bothered.) If we had a lesser help desk we'd have to hire more expensive headcount to actually deal with issues - it makes good business sense to keep them in-house and well trained. Oh, and we promote heavily from within, so everyone on the desk knows it's in their best career interests to soak up as much as they can. It makes them more hire-able internally and externally. I think they handle north of 30K calls a month with 24/7 coverage, it's pretty impressive what they do with a fairly small and focused group.
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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.
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I worked for IBM for 3 years so I have first hand knowledge how bad their tech support is. IBM staff has to use the same tech support that their customers use. Eating your own dog food they call it, or dog shit as the case may be.
Let me briefly describe the process you have to go through, Call in, work you way down 5 layers of automated phone messages and finally get a live person. That person barely speaks English and really hates their job. This is Tier 1. They ask you a few simple questions and to describe the problem. Lastly, he or she asked what priority you want to make it, Level 1 - call back in 24 hours, Level 2 - call back in a week, Level 3 - call back in ???, hell, I don't know, never made any level 3. You have to make it a Level 1 or you will won't get anybody to look a it for a week. Every help ticket is now a Level 1.
So the next day, you get a call from Tier 2 support. Really, this is a Tier 1 person, who has had a month's worth of training. He goes down a script of all the typical problem, tell you what you need type. Oh course, you have already done this because the those are all online. He then waste another 15 minutes of your time fumbling in the dark and then gives up.
Another 24 hours pass, then you get a call from Tier 3 support. This guys has a year or more experience and is familiar with all the features of the product. He listens to your attempts, then asks you to do something and actually fixes the problem in about 5 minutes. He is the rare bird in IBM Tech support. Also, he is so overworked because Tier 1 and 2 are close to useless that he burns out and moves to so other division just as soon as he can.
That's it. That's how IBM tech support works..
Sincerely, Ex-IBMer
worst artical ever.... who really care's? as long as they have the correct answer to your question when they call and they are nice to talk to does it really matter. i am not more than high school educated and i do just fine, i have been in technical support for the best part of 15years. due to the massive expense of higher education in the UK i have not done it. the only thing that higher education gives you is a better earning potential but that is not at the top of everyone thougths...
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.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Does anyone realize that IQ scores are normalized with respect to age? The IQ of an average anybody is 100. That statement is no more an insult to Americans than it is a compliment to Indians. In fact, it reflects how poorly the speaker understands IQ.
Statements like these permeate the outsourcing industry and encourage VPs to offshore. Then you interview the offshore employees and they don't know anything technical, can't produce reports/statuses, and can't use simple logic. There are good people in India, but nowhere near as many as the industry thinks there are and the good ones are not working for peanuts. The going rate for competent people is pretty close to US rates, the people work gets offshored to, who can't make those rates really can't do much.
CVs from offshored employees are pretty funny and almost universally fictional (based on 25 interviews over multiple projects). The guys we hire are pretty much as competent as the ones I deal with at IBM and Oracle, and the problem is the offshoring industry (with some help from the Indian educational system that is much more stratified than the US one).
I know people who do offshoring properly (they do 55% to 65% of work onshore, pay $15-20 an hour for offshore juniors, know people offshore and know the business culture there) and make it work, but they save 5-10% not the 60% the big outsourcers are aiming for.
And clients have to figure out that if you replace one person onshore with 5 people offshore who cannot, as a group, do the work of the one person they replaced, the client is NOT saving money. "But now you have FIVE people, you can do SHIFTS." Sigh... You can change the SLA from 2 hours to five days but you are not helping your business.
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