Outsourcing and Offshoring-cheaper labor with a decrease in user satisfaction
Shipping certain operations to countries with cheaper labor is a very popular trend right now, particularly in the financial industry and technology organizations. Sites like Outsource2India advocate the obvious economic advantages of outsourcing certain operations, which in theory sounds fine. Has anyone had negative experiences lately with a call centers based overseas? I have had 2 recently with India, and both were horrendous. The first was a call I placed to American Express several months back about an account security issue. The service representative from India informed me that there was a suspicious charge on my wife's account for Sex. My response was obviously "what????" It turned out after 5 more minutes of discussion and conferencing in my wife that he was not saying "Sex" but was in fact trying (quite poorly) to say "Sacks, " and the charge was legit. The call probably took 10 minutes longer than it should have.
My more recent experience was with Microsoft a few weeks back. I called them the same night I bashed Toshiba over their garbage support of the Gigabeat, hoping maybe they could help. Again, my call went to call screener in India who wouldn't even let me speak to an engineer until he understood why I was calling. This was like trying to explain a nuclear weapon design to a 3-year old. He then proceeded to start ever sentence with the phrase "Ok sir, regarding...." I was ready to scream (mostly Toshiba's fault), so I hung up.
The moral of the story is that firms need to factor in user experience when deciding whether to outsource certain operations. If someone needs to call back more than once because the first person was not capable of understanding a problem, the advantage of outsourcing has just disappeared. In addition, it can sour an experience with a company, and would put a person's decision to use that company for goods and services again in question. I am comtemplating just asking to be directed to a US office if the situation occurs again.