The situation at the moment is you phone up, you get put through to someone in New Dehli that doesn't understand what you are saying, doesn't know what the hell you are talking about anyway and then can't give you any information.

This was ALWAYS going to happen but the greedy and blindly stupid companies couldn't wait to outsource to India. When the inevetable happens they try to make it sound like they have done something laudable and manage to convince the silly farker that submitted this. This should have gotten the DUMBASS tag, not the hero tag. They caused their own problems in the face of FACTS, put people out of work in 2 separate countries and wasted millions of £'s in the process then make a big deal out of how good they are. Wankers.

Have any of you actually spoken with customer service in India? It's so very exasperating. Obtaining technical help is nearly impossible due to the thick accents and language barrier.

Can't say I'm opposed to outsourcing. I've receive great customer service from the Phillipines.

GavinTheAlmighty:



Motherfarking Amish


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!! Damnitt, you made me waste a whole mouthfull of beer.

kennydra - dude, your retarded, you actually have borders. We don't.

Arguably we do, as we have a border with the Republic of Ireland.

I bloody well don't care what happens to Powergen India, so long as they leave Powergen Italia alone (http://www.powergenitalia.com/).

Ahem, heroes? Dell did the same thing not so long ago with its call centers. They're simply caving in to public pressure. If people get pissed off enough about not receiving adequate customer service from overseas CSR, then the companies are forced to relocate those jobs back to the home country. It's just business, nothing heroic.

Nobodyn0se: A company's loyalty is to its stockholders, and anything that drives costs down is good for stockholders.


Not when it drives away your customers.

Customers == revenue

Lower costs without customers == doomed business

Driving away customers is not the best way to serve shareholders. Whatever business school you've attended has stolen your money.

I put an HTML tag in there saying / pedant

but I am not 1337

so it VANISHED

In England, Indian people are called "Packies."

Arguably we do, as we have a border with the Republic of Ireland.

Way to blow a hole in my argument :-) Good catch!

Gavino: you actually have borders. We don't.

What the hell do you call the line between Northern Ireland and Ireland?

Headlice - an administrive division?

/please don't blow me up, I don't mean it, to be sure.

<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/57/SI1987Bo.jpg/260px-S I1987Bo.jpg"><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/57/SI1987Bo.jpg/260px-SI 1987Bo.jpg"></a>

Come to think of it I have traveled abroad. I've been to Louisiana.

The problem isnt the Inidan accents- its that you're dealing with people who are undertrained and under-resourced. They have no idea what they are doing or whats going on and are reading from a script. They work for a third party and are put there to take the flack and keep the customer away from the company. They rarely help and are often difficult to understand or have problems understanding anything. They cannot and will not do anything which isnt in their protocols. Also they never give you their real name. No your name is not Bob. Its Sanjit or something. Just say it and stop dicking me around!

I'm sick of it- they get paid to take the flack- I give them flack and more. I have had too many problems with indian call centres and I have been jerked around too many times by them. Fark em!

Outsourcing is one of the founding principles of the WTO. If you don't like it, tell your politicians.

Gavino

Man up you little girl. The UK honours historical figures who did far worse during the forging of the Empire and its own citizens than those petty examples.

theodicey:
I bloody well don't care what happens to Powergen India, so long as they leave Powergen Italia alone (http://www.powergenitalia.com/).

Outstanding! I salute you, sir!

Mugen. It's not manly to do the right thing? Are you Scottish or something?

India outsources 450 call center jobs to UK, switches focus to core business of stealing American software jobs.

I work in tech support for a major company and honestly, you have NO IDEA what it's like dealing with people who can't find the start button on their computer.. all day.. everyday.

The average Indian call center worker is much better-educated and speaks much better English than the average idiot who calls customer service. Remember the 35:10 rule.

theodicey
I bloody well don't care what happens to Powergen India, so long as they leave Powergen Italia alone (http://www.powergenitalia.com/).

For more on this subject, visit http://feracious.wordpress.com/2006/05/21/unfortunate-domain-names/.
Personally, I think Mole Station Nursery (molestationnursey.com) is just taking the piss.

Nobodyn0se

A company's loyalty is to its stockholders, and anything that drives costs down is good for stockholders. I think this may be one of the differences between European and US business management. Quite a few European managers believe that a company needs to extend its loyalty to the community in which it operates, the country it's located in, sometimes even to the employees (yes, really!) who make their living working for the company. The current trend of stockholders always gunning for maximum short-term earnings is not without its problems. Outsourcing entry-level jobs, for instance, makes it much harder to find, culture and promote talent from the inside, perhaps gaining a bit of loyalty in return.

This company did something good for their customers, and good for their country, but bad for business. Bad customer service tends not to be that great for business. Of course, they could just screw the customers and bet on their de facto monopoly status saving the day, but that sort of stuff rarely pays off in the long run.

Gavino: Headlice - an administrive division?

Good one, but here's a stumper: What's up with the Isle of Man? IIRC, it's part of the UK, but not a member of the EU, right?

/some of us Americans actually paid attention during geography class

Gavino

Exactly what do those images have to do with onshoring?

Please don't feed the trolls...not that I'm convinced that EatHam was doing much of anything except being a bit naive.

As for onshoring, it's the new black.

--h

USAirways is in the process of doing this with their reservation centers. Closing them down in Manilla and El Salvador. Not worth the hassle or the craptastic service.

Perhaps customers were tied of seeing this sort of message on a webpage
I am not sure i understand ur ? fully
Arg! Does it really save time typing "ur" for "your"? And the ? for question makes the baby jesus' parser fail.

It said the move would create 450 new jobs by the end of the year and reduce the number of customer complaints.

Now the customers will be complaining about the rise in the cost of power.

OK I try one last time. This was a German Utility co. That owns a British Electric company. The Brits outsourced and the Germans brought the jobs back.

from the article: "Powergen is owned by German utility group E.ON."

Why are isolationism and protectionism such popular political positions? They are the worst modern political movements (worse even than the religious right) and what's scarier is that they have support on both sides.

Funny, a bunch of people gleefully using entirely outsourced foreign-made computers to post on a website which is also hosted on entirely outsourced foreign-made computers.

The post topic ? outsourcing is bad !

The irony is delicious...

Will the customers be satisfied with their rate increase?

Nobodyn0se said:

I hate to say it, but I think that was a dumb move. A company's loyalty is to its stockholders, and anything that drives costs down is good for stockholders.

If they simply shot employees in the back of the head, rather than giving them severance pay.... that would be good for the bottom line, and good for the stockholders.

Heck... if they used their shipments of products from overseas to smuggle-in cocaine, so that they could sell the cocaine for a huge profit.... that would be fantastic for the bottom line, and really great for stockholders.

Basically... if ALL you care about is money, and the bottom line, then you're basically a gangster and a criminal.

As evidence, I present you with the Halliburton/Chevron/Oval Office merger.

Headlice: What's up with the Isle of Man? IIRC, it's part of the UK, but not a member of the EU, right?

Nevermind, Wikipedia just told me that the Isle of Man is not a part of the UK. It's more of a Suzerainty of the UK.

Is there anything Wikipedia can't do?

pestochicken

In England, Indian people are called "Packies."


You are thinking of "Pakis" which is short for Pakistanis.

Indian people are called "swastika using (holy), laltika wearing (reddot) Aryans". (it's their term in their indo-european language in their aryan holy book called the Rig Veda).

"The average Indian call center worker is much better-educated and speaks much better English than the average idiot who calls customer service. Remember the 35:10 rule."

Yes, but the average Brit who calls isn't used to speaking 'international' English. Plus, the Indians usually learn with an american accent as well - so you get a sort of Amerindian mix that's just impossible.

fuzzycuffs: Guess what, just be patient and if you can't understand, simply ask them to repeat themselves. It's not hard to live through life one you realize that people are different and that's not a bad thing.

Um. Time is money. I'm paid to perform my job 40 hours a week. If I have to spend more of that time patiently listening & relistening & explaining simple concepts that gradeschoolers could grasp over & over & over again instead of accomplishing something useful on my job - that's not a good use of my time.

If you're going to learn to speak English in order to get a job that requires speaking English, you should train yourself to enunciate English properly. Look - I can speak French. However I can't speak it well. I wouldn't dream of getting a job that requires me to man a phone and answer calls in French, because I would expect to get fired for not being able to do the job. I wouldn't expect to waste the time of my employer's customers simply so that I get warm fuzzies about my employment at the firm. This isn't a racial issue - I don't care what color your skin is, or where you were born. I just want to do my job. Complaining about someone's inability to speak English properly isn't automatically racial bigotry as you infer.

My problem with most call centers doesn't have much to do with accents. It's their poor grasp of the English language coupled with their poor grasp of technical issues that they're supposed to have enough knowledge of to assist you.

That said, I did recently place a call to a support center. The person who answered the phone spoke English well, with no trace of accent, understood my problem, apologized for the lack of movement on their part to update the ticket I opened online, and pushed through the last bit that needed to be done in order to RMA the defective hardware back to them. It wasn't until later when I checked the ticket status that I saw entries from the guy I spoke with documenting my call-in - and the gu was clearly from India. If call centers were full of people like that I wouldn't care where they were based out of.

I love that it (outsourcing call centers) may be reversing. I think about the major corps that are almost always derided because of calling a center where you just know someone was hired because they speak limited English, get put through a week or two of training and have to start taking calls. It drives me nuts, and that's why I won't buy HP printers until they get someone that can understand what I'm saying. Customer service, if the tech can't communicate with me, isn't customer service.

It's bad enough in my job where the honchos push us to adapt to Spanish speakers. Fine, my ancestors didn't speak perfect English. But, dammit they made an attempt at it. They didn't expect Americans to speak German to accomidate them.

But many see it racist for expecting a person to learn the dominant language of the country they move to. Instead it's reversed and we're supposed to be accepting of different languages and learn them to talk to each other. Any news on making English an official language in the US? No? Oh, yes, because that's racist.

Yet if Americans flooded Mexico and demanded everyone learn English, we'd be accused, yet again, of hegemony.

We're blamed day in and day out of trying to bend the world to our liking, yet we get accused of closed-mindedness and racism for hoping people that come here can speak the language.

I'm ready to give up and just speak Swahili. And if the DMV, banks, government offices and insurance companies can't deal with it, they can adapt to me. Or I'll get Jesse Jackson to sue them for being insensitive.

I, for one, always preferred to be kept on hold and treated like an imbecile by people I could understand.

"not prepared to achieve savings at the risk or expense of customer satisfaction"

=

"we weren't prepared for the public relations disaster our Indian call center created"

Sucks for those Indians whose jobs got outsourced.

What was the quote from the other day: "--when learning to work at a call center, it is important to remember, the average 35-year-old American has the emotional maturity of the average 10-year-old Indian---"

It was priceless---and sadly, too damn true.

Pharaoh.Faucet: The average Indian call center worker is much better-educated and speaks much better English than the average idiot who calls customer service. Remember the 35:10 rule.

Um, keep in mind that all degrees aren't created equally. Just like in the US, some Indian "colleges" will give degrees to anyone who writes them a big enough check.

FINALLY!!!!

Noting against India, but it is obvious that 95% of the time they are reading "script" and have no farking clue, then they give you delay tactics 'try this BS and call back later' - might as well be talking to a machine.

/not talking "home user" support either
//Cisco TAC for example - take a hint from England

LunerEclipse618

That is an easy question: they appeal to ignorance and nationalism. Most seem to be nationalistic and believe that, notwithstanding that they will never meet or otherwise interact in any way, they have a stronger link with a complete stranger within a certain geographical confine than a complete stranger who coincidentally resides outside of it. Almost all are ignorant. Combine the two and protectionist, or even autarkical, policies are inexorable.

I initially credited the general population with at least the comparitive ability to note that, generally speaking, P(trade) is less than P(isolation) and therefore trade is beneficial to them, but apparently they do not have that ability and/or they are bizarrely altruistic and would prefer to pay said random stranger of the same nationality gratuities and absorb higher prices.

Hdhale - I happen to value the contribution trolls make to our society and our discourse.

I will have no truck with anti-troll bigotry.

Harumph.

They are really good, because they are a power company and have no competition anyway! If it was some other company, it could be seen as a move for publicity, but a power company is an artificial monopoly and can usually get away with just about anything.

Good Job!

Erm, just a few words of advice for all you kids:

The responsibility of C-level executives is, indeed, to their shareholders (at least in the U.S.). Their responsibility involves having a viable and successful business plan. A good business plan doesn't just involve cost reduction - that's just a recipe for stagnation - it also involves growth in market share (via customer satisfaction and value for money) plus a whole bunch of other factors.
There is a quantifiable benefit for being perceived as a 'good guy', or in supporting your local economy.
The initial attempts at outsourcing seemed to be promising, based on simple cost accountancy, but practice has shown that this is an overly narrow view. Hardly surprising when you let accountants rather than businessmen run a company.
It sound like the UK company is sufficiently flexible (i.e. intelligent) to change its strategy based on negative feedback.
Good for them.
/We now return you to the usual rants

Tsk, tsk.

All of those poor Indian employees just caste aside like that.