Colliding With Customers

December 15, 2003 (Computerworld)

When Dell yanked its corporate PC tech support out of India and brought it back to U.S. soil recently, the move snapped a lot of people to attention. And no wonder. Here's one of the industry's most hyperefficient, cost-conscious vendors abandoning -- at least for now -- a cheaper offshore alternative because of customer complaints about poor service.
In our front-page story last week ["Offshore Support Questioned," QuickLink 43340], other heavyweights such as IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Computer Associates hastened to say that they're not planning any Dell-style retreats from offshore tech support centers. But if the customer pain meter keeps moving in the wrong direction -- and users start walking away over service issues -- those offshore savings could look a lot less compelling in the long run.
So far, of course, the vendors know better than to redirect their high-end customers overseas for support. A Microsoft VP made the point in our story that no "premier support" contracts will be serviced out of the company's new shop in Bangalore.
In theory, the location of technical support people shouldn't matter as long as the service quality is kept high and language barriers are kept low. In reality, the user experience isn't so idyllic. The rapid growth of India's multibillion-dollar outsourcing industry has made skilled IT workers harder to find and keep, especially in the call centers, where attrition rates can reach 35% a year.
We heard from many readers last week with stories to tell about frustrating offshore support encounters. They complained about rigid, "by the book" technicians who wasted their time wading through fixes already tried. They ran into problems with bad phone connections, strongly accented English that was hard to understand, and just plain incompetence.
"The folks answering the support call do not know the product they are supporting, nor do they know the tools for reporting problems," said one reader. "If Dell, Microsoft, HP, etc. continue to move support jobs to India, they won't have to worry about customers, because there won't be any."
A New York-based chief technology officer, who'd had no complaints about previous Microsoft support, saw service quality change just recently when he called about an Exchange problem.
"The call got routed to a support center in India, and the technician in this case was obviously unqualified," the CTO said. "He made little attempt to understand our problem ... and within five minutes suggested we rebuild the whole machine and reinstall Exchange" -- advice wisely ignored. Ultimately, an experienced technician in Dallas solved the problem.
Another IT manager contended that the total cost of software ownership is spiraling in the wrong direction. "Now companies are sending their support overseas, costing customers more in time to resolve the problems," he noted. "All they really did is shift the expense over to their customer."
Despite the backlash, there are few signs that offshore outsourcing's growth is slowing. Irate customers are certainly going to attract more attention to the dark side of offshoring than displaced software technicians will, but we're still long on anecdotes and short on statistics about the long-term impact.
In the meantime, emerging best practices suggest that you need to ask for performance metrics about problem resolution, as well as independent surveys on customer satisfaction. Make sure your vendor's training programs are hammering on language skills as much as on technical ones.
If Dell's action is an early warning, other vendors may also end up changing course to avoid a customer collision.
Maryfran Johnson is editor in chief of Computerworld. You can contact her at maryfran_johnson@computerworld.com.