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Why do companies export customer service to non-english speaking countries? why is it that I speak with the computer recognition software and it can understand me and speak more clearly that the "live person" they have on the other end?!?!?!!?

I just renewed my x-box live subscription on the phone and spent an hour to tell them something it would have taken five minutes for an englsih speaking person to get.

next time I am just doing it online...

Probably because they think it'll be cheaper for them?

You should also keep in mind that just because the person you were talking to was hard to understand/had a hard time understanding you doesn't mean they were in a different country. How many times have you been to a store or talked to any member of the public and had the same trouble.

Not all companies outsource to India or other non-english countries (although Microsoft seems to specialize in this). For example, hp-shopping does (used to) have a contract with a place in Halifax. Minacs (the place in Halifax) also has contracts with at least one American bank, and possibly some other businesses. There's a reason why there's so many call centres in Nova Scotia. Companies like the fact that they can pay less per agent, yet still keep their customers happy because they think that they're talking to another American. In fact, when my brothers were working the phones at Minacs, they were only taking calls from Americans, and were told to say they were from Maine if asked about where they were from.

Let's face it, technical support is a shitty proposition for any computer company. For every important question, you probably get a hundred idiots who blame you for their own intolerably poor computer skills. Small wonder companies would rather not handle it themselves.

Believe it or not, most of the calls I get are from people who are horribly embarrassed by their lack of computer skills, regardless of their actual level of skill, and often assume that they screwed something up. I guess it's possible Mac support gets unusual callers, but I wouldn't bet on it. It's far more often that people are unhappy that they have to pay for support or that they think we'll repair/replace something that they broke or lost. And even that isn't the average call.

Mind you, a lot of the problem with customer relations and tech support is the whole voice mail apparatus. By the time you finally get ahold of a human being, you can be so frustrated and enraged by the endless menus and soulless voice recordings that you're bound to be tense, irritable, and obnoxious to him. And then he'll go home and complain to his buddies that the callers are pricks.

The reason is that in house technical support doesn't scale well at all. Companies will usually have in house Tier 2 or Tier 3 tech support, but for consumer oriented products and services, tier 1 is best to outsource because it is:

1) Cheaper
2) Easy to scale
3) Doesn't burden your company with needing to hire people who know how to handle idiots

Let's face it, people who need Tier 1 tech support are total morons for the most part. Tier 1 essentially functions as a call screening service because the people who handle escalations are usually tech support people with at least some QA or Engineering experience and they are awfully expensive to retain. You don't want to waste them on folks that don't remember to plug in their computer.

I admit, I'm a little biased on this front since being part of an organization that is setting up a support network and I get to experience a lot of the stupidity of our customers second hand.

Keep in mind that the solution to the #1 tech support caller is to plug the thing in/turn the thing on. I'd be pissed working a job that had to deal with such a high number of morons.

in the most recent PC Gamer, in their gaming systems compendium article, they compared most high-end gaming rig manufacturers (like Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Dell, etc) via a spec sheet, and one of the criteria was "24-hour customer support" - a yes/no, and if no, how restricted their hours were.

Having called Alienware's 24-hour customer support before, I'd gladly take the restricted hours with another American, instead of an Indian with basic English skills.

I had one issue with my mac, once, and calling AppleCare's support people in California was actually a pleasure by comparison.

for what it costs to pay me to support a product (and i'm out sourced tier 1 sometimes subbing for t2) they can pay for 10 warm bodies in india.. the only time we can compete with them is when language is important. and most of the time plug it in and reboot suffices.

unfortunatly minacs nolonger has the hpshopping contract, it's back in india and now a 5 minute call takes 1/2 an hour, if you have some one coaching the agent on what needs to be done.

The irony is that companies that should know better/be able to afford better (INTEL, I'm looking at you, you bastards) ride the Indian Express, whereas Acer, who isn't exactly the biggest powerhouse around, has all-US tech support. I hate calling outsourced tech support at work...I'm already fighting with a piece of delinquent hardware and my boss, I don't need to fight a language barrier at the same time.

Whats slightly ironic is that some Indian companies are now outsourcing their own IT call centres to..Ireland. That has to be the most ironic thing in many a year.

...dammit, I want to call some Irish guy on a tech support line. It's at least a generally more comprehensible accent, plus I personally like it.

The New Zealand Inland Revenue Department outsources its IT helpdesk to Unisys, which is where I work. Ironically they seem to have recently taken on a lot more Indian and east Asian staff. Makes the job...interesting, especially when I then have to relay the job to somewhere like HP where I have to talk to the Indian helpdesk and then try to get them to understand that I'm not an end user that I'm from another helpdesk.

HP Helpdesk: "Hello welcome to HP can I start with your first and last name please?"

Me: "Before we begin, I'll mention that I'm actually calling from another helpdesk, I'm logging this call on behalf of a client."

HPHD: "Okay..."

Me: "Right...[details...model/serial number...problem]..."

HPHD: "Okay, now can you turn the laptop upside down and check the..."

Me: "No, I'm calling from the helpdesk, the laptop is at another site."

HPHD: "Can I get you to switch it on and check for..."

Me: "No, it's at another site. Look, a technician has already done all the hard work for you, you really just need to type."

HPHD: "..."

Me: "Hello?"

HPHD: "Did it start up successfully?"

...Continue up until the point where I'm about to get a job number out of this person...

HPHD: "Oh, this is an NC series notebook?"

Me: "Yes, I mentioned that."

HPHD: "Oh I'm sorry, you've come through to the wrong helpdesk, let me transfer you through to our corporate care line."

Me: "...what?"

HPCCHD: "Hello welcome to HP Corporate can I start with your first and last name please?"

Me: "...kill me"

I work in in-house tech support for the biggest ISP in Finland. We have to handle our own tech support because there is no way to outsource the support anywhere and we also have the tools to fix a lot of problems right off the bat. The things that prevent outsourcing are the language barrier and the difficulty of making all the same tools available to those agents. We'd need to pay their wages plus premium on the service and we'd get shittier quality than doing it ourselves.

The thing to do is also limit your support to the essentials. The company I work for is an ISP. We provide people with an internet connection and our main responsibility is seeing to it that that the connection stays up. We also give basic support for setting up an email account and on a bundled custom tailored version of the F-Secure Internet Security Suite that we provide as a service.

EVERYTHING else (including data security, even using our security suite) is the customer's responsibility and the bottom line is that we don't support it. If they fuck it up, we're not going to unfuck it for them. We tell them to ask friends or family or to use a professional service or refer them to the appropriate HW/SW vendor's tech support.

Most ofthe customers are pretty ignorant, but they are usually not obnoxious about it and will do exactly what you tell them to. You just need patience.

Edi

Spyder wrote:<snip>

I also have experience in how inflexible overseas help desk agents are. I had to call the Microsoft line in order to activate an XP install. In my mind, there were two possibilities for this: either I had just gone over the limit for number of activations, or had used my sister's CD (I had both mine and hers in one hand) and my CD code. I asked the simple question whether the CD codes were tied directly to one CD. The response: "Uh... Please tell me the verification code that you see on your screen." which is the question that she asked before I posed mine.