The AntiBlogger

A recent topic of debate for me and many of my friends has been outsourcing customer service jobs to India. I’ll start right off and tell you that I’m on the “pro” side of this argument although most of those I talk to are not.

In the beginning – calling customer service just to get re-routed to somewhere in India or Bangladesh was a pain in the ass. I freely admit that I’ve had more than one bad experience when dealing with these outsourced call centers. But then again – I’ve had more than one bad experience when dealing with US based call centers. In fact, I’ve only had a couple of good experiences when working with customer service centers located in the States.

See, everyone wants to rip on overseas call centers because of two reasons. One, it’s taking away jobs from Americans, and Two, that damn accent.

Lets rip apart the language difference. At first, yes – many of the call center employees were absolutly HORRIBLE – but, for the most part, this is no longer the issue.

In the past 2 months, I’ve been on the phone with a minimum of 20 different call center employees – about half of those were located here in the states and the other half somewhere overseas.

Of the 10 or so calls that involved overseas operators, I only had trouble understanding one, and in that case I simply told them I was having a hard time understanding their accent and asked that someone else help me – No problem, a few seconds later I was talking to someone that spoke near-perfect english.

Of the 10 calls that involved US based operators I had 3 problem calls – I could not understand a THING they were saying, and on two of these calls, when I asked to speak to someone different, the operator took offense and the call ended up being escalated to a supervisor after much frustration.*

There ya have it. At least in my recent experience, the accent problem isn’t much of a problem at all.

Now, lets address the Jobs issue. Everyone is bitching about the jobs going to India while they’re having a hard time finding jobs here in the states. I’m sorry to say – But tough shit.

The reality is pretty straight forward. Just because the jobs are going overseas doesn’t mean they’re being taken away from qualified individuals here in the States. The harsh reality is people here in the US think they deserve to be paid well for jobs they’re not qualified to do. Corporate America has finally decided to take a stand against this type of hiring Americans for the sake of creating jobs and have started hiring qualified individuals that will work for a justifiable wage.

Most of the Americans that argue against outsourcing to India are not educated enough to know what they’re talking about. Most people think that answering a phone at a call center is just like being a general operator – reading a screen and answering questions – but the reality is they need to be educated enough to answer questions and troubleshoot issues that aren’t ‘by the book’ problems.

I think the biggest problem most people have when they deal with customer service isn’t an accent or language issue, but rather an issue of intelligence. They don’t get the answers they need because the person on the other end of the line simply doesn’t know the answer.

Many will argue that we should just educate employees better… But why? Why should American business’ spend the money to educate people on how to do their jobs? I mean, would you hire an uneducated carpenter at the going rate, then spend extra money to educate them on the proper use of a hammer and nails? I don’t think so! You’d hire someone that knows what they’re doing, save a lot of money, and get a job thats done right.

The situation here is no different – If a company like Dell decided to start hiring people here in the States rather than outsourcing, one of two things would happen … 1) You’d call tech support or customer service about that laptop you just ordered and get some idiot who couldn’t answer your questions, get thrown into the hold queue and end up frustrated that you’ve wasted half your day on the phone, or 2) You would have just paid double for your laptop, or not been able to afford it at all because the cost of educating and staffing Americans just got passed down to you.

One way or another, people have to start understanding that they need to get educated and make their own opportunities or someone else will. You don’t get something for nothing, and nobody that’s living the American dream is doing so because it was handed to them. They’re there because they worked hard to get there. If the have-nots in our country don’t take that to heart, the American dream may soon be the Indian, Phillipino or Hungarian dream.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what set me off on this little rant; I had the BEST customer service phone call today. A call that ended up at a Bangladesh call center. My questions were answered by a young lady that spoke perfect English, was amazingly polite, knew everything about the product I was calling about and ended the conversation by bringing her supervisor on the line just to make sure everything was handled to my satisfaction. Exceptional customer service.