There are plenty of outsourcing articles, but here is a link to an example from BusinessWeek.com to get you warmed up to the conversation:

Outsourcing: Beyond Bangalore

I used to believe that an entirely free world job market is best for the U.S. I thought when low-level jobs leave the country, Americans have more opportunities to fall into more complicated roles that we would perform better than anyone else. Experience in industry has taught me that this is only partially true. The remainder of the truth is devastating to our industry. The export of service jobs has contributed heavily to the annihilation of the excellent service that average Americans use to receive. It has also brought the collapse of the pay scales of technical professions. In addition, the U.S. economy is creating hordes of low-level service jobs, like retail sales jobs. Manufacturing and design jobs, among other good jobs, are no longer being created. Taking all of this into account, I believe it would bolster our country in a wholesale manner if corporations would bring tech support back to the U.S. shores.

Many of us have stories about talking with, specifically, foreign tech support. I recently dealt with someone with a thick Indian dialect, in trying to get support for Norton Antivirus. I cannot be sure, but I would bet cold cash that this person was overseas. How would I summarize the conversation? The support person could do nothing but read from a script. If you have a burning desire to find out exactly why people complain about foreign tech support, then check out this transcript. You do not have to be a techie to understand the repercussions of this conversation. I will anonymously name the support representative “Joe”. This conversation is verbatim. Joe’s name has been changed to protect the Stupid.

<begin>
Problem: XP SP , Antivirus . The popup icon that indicates that the scanner is scanning incoming/outgoing email no longer shows. The settings for that are correct in the antivirus/email options. I am not sure if the antivirus is doing its job.

analyst Joe has entered room
Joe>Hello JB, my name is Joe.
JB>Hello Joe.
Joe>Welcome to Symantec Virus & Spyware Solutions.
Is this the first time you are contacting us or do you have a Case Number?
JB>The first time.
Joe>hello JB
Joe>Ok. please wait.
Joe>which norton product you installed on your system?
JB>Norton AV .
Joe>Ok
Joe>Let me know about your issue.
JB>The popup icon that indicates that the scanner is scanning incoming/outgoing email no longer shows. The settings for that are correct in the antivirus/email options. I am not sure if the antivirus is doing its job.
Joe>Ok.Did you enable the option for scanning the e-mails?
JB>Yes, email scanning is on, and so are the options to show the popup icon.
Joe>Did you get any virus alerts?
JB>No, system is clean, I’m sure I have no viruses.
Joe>Ok.But there may nasty entries in the registry also.Are you sure it is clean?
JB>I recently scanned the entire hard drive, and I get all updates, there were no warnings. Yes, quite sure there are no problems.
Joe>Ok.
Joe>Let me know ,then why you are not sure that the antivirus is doing its job or not. ?
JB>There is a popup window that normally indicates an incoming email is being scanned. Then it disappears. That popup window no longer is popping up.
Joe>Ok.It is feature in NAV that it scans the mails you are sending and also it scans the incoming mails.
Joe>There is nothing to worry .
JB>It is supposed to show me a progress indicator when sending email. Where is my progress indicator?
Joe>As long as there is no virus in your system,You have no problem.Do not worry.Everything is fine.
<end “support”>

The above conversation is pure unadulterated folly. My time with Joe lasted a full sixteen minutes. What is this poor support costing Symantec in computer hardware, internet bandwidth, labor, etc? I will not include training in that list because we could all give someone a script, and tell them to answer incoming requests, and get a conversation similar to the one above without training them at all.

The root of this overall problem stems from the corporation stockholders in the U.S. All they work for is their personal goal of pinching yet another penny from the budget. Providing a customer “good” or even “reasonable” service is no longer in their business plan. We in the U.S. may talk about “cheap Chinese goods” and such, but now others can talk about “poor American service”. We should be ashamed about that.

What the offending stockholders do not seem to have a handle on is that one well-trained worker can easily replace five workers like Joe. I do not consider the CEO’s liable for this. They strive for important positions, and jobs making good money. These are the same wants that I have. They, more than anyone, must execute to the letter what their boss, the stockholder dictates. If they fail in this execution, the stockholder fires them. I am positive there are many CEO’s of major corporations, whom you could corner at the punch bowl of a dinner party, ask about their company’s recent slide in service, and get a shoulder shrug, accompanied with, “These are the resources we have to work with right now.”

Ironically, the one business that we would expect to know how to support its customers is a software or hardware vendor, where support is, or used to be, key to their business. If we look at the service ratings for the major pc retailers, we might discover their service ratings have gone up and down throughout the years, like a seesaw. The company may initially perform well with its customers. After it develops a huge customer base, it then pinches pennies, and consequently service becomes poor. They may then “fix” the issue in a short-term hiring or training blitz, and bring their ratings back up. However, monitoring the business articles about these companies makes me think these good service-bad service cycles are never ending.

This is how I would fix any of the corporations that have offshore helpdesks. Immediately bring the helpdesk back to the U.S. Populate the workforce with a fraction (25%?) of the total people that were employed in the foreign country. Next, intensively train the helpdesk. The person that answers the phone should not be merely an operator, who has a small list of simple problems they can fix before escalating the issue to second level support. They should be first and second level support all in one. The only issues escalated to the next level should be brand-new issues that there is no record of. The people on the helpdesk must love computers and generally like dealing with people. They should like the company, want to stay long-term, and wish to advance to programming and development of the company’s products. With this economy, a company in many geographic areas of the U.S. can even hire learned programmers direct from college, and teach them the software from the ground up. A company that follows such a plan will develop superior service, at a reasonable cost, and will develop a loyal customer base. Yes, the company will not be able to pinch every penny according to the shareholders’ whims. Having employees who care necessitates a “decent pay” whatever that may be. However, the company will have tremendous long-term success, and would continually steal market share from those with perpetually poor service.

Does having a well-trained first-level helpdesk seem like a pie in the sky? Only if one is okay with building a corporation based on “warm bodies.” Someone filling a chair, showing up everyday for work, is not necessarily an asset to the company. Personally believing that most problems in a corporation stem from management, not the employees, the lack of insight into good procedures, and intense training always boggles my mind. It is a shame that corporations, not just in the U.S., but everywhere, are built with a general acceptance of mediocrity. Part of the trickle down is due to the stockholders of corporations believing that working everyone in the corporation as hard as possible means the most profit or the most benefit to them. An example for tech support would be (and there are plenty of them) a manager who evaluates employees by the number of calls they take. Occasionally, surveys are sent to a handful of customers to gauge their satisfaction. I think all paying customers should be hanging up their phones satisfied. Where is the guage to measure that? Unfortunately, getting the most work done is unrelated to the quality of work and how meaningful the results are. Ever find yourself producing results all day long for your boss, knowing the results are not even applicable to the problems at hand? But regarding the topic at hand, with so many people interested in working with computers, how difficult can it be to find someone excited about computers, who wants to put all of their energy into the job? The biggest problem, typically, is the company somehow de-motivates people. Alas, these are more topics for other days.

The short term, linear, myopic thinking of the stockholders of most corporations in the United States is killing our service, killing our reputation, wasting millions of hours of consumers’ time, and escalating everyone’s everyday stress. Since so much of our manufacturing has disappeared from our shores, or even evaporated into thin air, and large sectors of our service have become literally worthless to the consumer, what do we have left? At least the United States is a perpetual job machine for India and China. We have that going for us.

[Update February 23, 2007:  Check out Joel on Software.  He has it nailed
with regards to customer service.]

     Seven steps to remarkable customer service

jbm