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Are Indian High Schoolers Manning Your IBM Help Desk?

Posted by samzenpus on from the cut-rate-help dept.

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.'"

27 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. No shit sherlock by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:No shit sherlock by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Funny

      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...

      Haven't seen the dang phone system we just had bestowed upon us, have you? Geez. Why not just drill my skull and put an implant in and get rid of this Cisco stuff.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:No shit sherlock by JDG1980 · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    3. Re:No shit sherlock by jo42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:No shit sherlock by hawguy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

    5. Re:No shit sherlock by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    6. Re:No shit sherlock by hawguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:No shit sherlock by larry+bagina · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

      They're in 1971. Where minimum wage was $1.60/hour. $200/month isn't good or bad in and of itself, only relative to the cost of living. Rampant inflation has fucked us up the ass like Jerry Sandusky in the shower with a 10-year-old boy.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    8. Re:No shit sherlock by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

    9. Re:No shit sherlock by tsotha · · Score: 3, Informative

      You wouldn't do that, not because US high school graduates are too expensive, but because a US high school degree isn't a good indication of literacy. Maybe in India a high school degree means something (I don't know one way or another). But in the US, a BS is the new high school diploma.

    10. Re:No shit sherlock by funwithBSD · · Score: 3, Informative

      Except that is exactly what IBM is doing in the GDF centers (Fishkill, Dubuque, Colombia)

      They are hiring high school grads and putting them in first line jobs. If they stick with it, and get their certs/education (certs are provided by IBM) they can move up in the system. (I joined with no degree, although I have one now. I was not a entry level position either)

      The pay is somewhere in the $10 to $15 range, and yes, it is hard to get people to sign on at that wage.

      These resources are replacing India resources as those resources are getting harder to get. Not surprisingly, years of outsourcing to India has built an in country demand. The best and brightest head there because the hours are better, and often the pay is better too.

      As for the Indian work quality... it varies. I have worked with some that were as good as any US tech, and some that are mere chair warmers.
      It definitely takes 2 to 4 to match a quality US resources, but you can afford to do that.

      Any customer can demand US only resources if they are willing to pay for it... but they are willing to do so.

      The GDF centers get US resources in close parity, a 15 to 25% premium. Many customers are opting to use those resources in place of overseas resources. Work is still shipped over there in "backoffice" type support of the US based teams, such as provisioning of disk, etc, but the customer is not in contact with them.

      There is also a growing need for "US Only" based on regulations. Governments are expanding regulations to require data and systems are handled by US citizens only because of the nature of the data. That is a fast growing quarter.

      --
      Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
  2. Skill Requirements by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Skill Requirements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      Actually, car mechanics nowadays is more of an IT skill, in that the diagnostics are run by instrumentation.

      Fantastic! That means that the next time I need my car serviced I just need to find an Indian high school student!!!

    2. Re:Skill Requirements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Skill Requirements by couchslug · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "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.

      --
      "This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
  3. Big deal? by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Big deal? by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  4. College not needed... by cavtroop · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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?

  5. Doesn't surprise me one bit... by erp_consultant · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

  6. Inflammatory title of course by beltsbear · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Inflammatory title of course by frosty_tsm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      +1

      High Schooler != High School Graduate

  7. Same as it was here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. What if college is a distraction? by nido · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
    www.teslabox.com
  9. You Get What They Pay For by Greyfox · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  10. "High School Graduates", not "High Schoolers" by billstewart · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  11. Not just inflation by rsilvergun · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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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  12. Re:The whole article is bullshit by sociocapitalist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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