John Linton A colleague sent me this last night:
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=6458598
which I found interesting. It is of course not much an article and is trivially referenced and badly written so as a set of facts it's fairly useless but it's two alleged main points are interesting:
1) Dell thinks it's possible to charge $US12.95 PER MONTH for a customer to call a US located call centre rather than their call centres in India.
Apart from the excessive cost Dell puts on a 'local' call answering service I would probably agree that Dell's call centres in India are a disaster based on our family's two experiences of calling them for service on a Dell laptop. However that had nothing to do with the quality of the people or their command of English. It related to the fact that the actual procedures for handling the call were so inadequate it took the best part of a day being on hold while being transferred between people who simply couldn't answer a non-technical question (the question was when would a promised replacement lap top arrive as the on line advised shipping arrival date had passed) and the quality of the telephone VoIP service made it impossible to actually hear what was being said (again nothing to do with the accent or command of English).
2) "We really believe that our customer satisfaction saves us more money in the long term than off shoring," said Jitterbug CEO David Inns.
It's not clear that this small company:
http://www.jitterbug.com/
ever had overseas call centres to be able to make a statement like that but, reading their web site, you see that their target market is the archly conservative 'US senior citizen' demographic which is notoriously xenophobic.
So the article itself is not of any real use but the views it highlights are relevant to us as we have decided that all of our back end processes (including technical support) will be provided from Sri Lanka - not as an outsourced call centre but as a company owned and managed by the same people who own and manage Exetel in Australia.
We did look, briefly, at 'out sourcing' but based on our personal Dell experience and many other aspects of that scenario never seriously considered it. Personally, I think that it's very difficult to outsource key aspects of any growing commercial company but that is, probably like the CEO of Jitterbug's view, one that I actually have no direct experience of. I do know several companies, including large Australian carriers, that have tried and failed in doing that.
So, for us, the question became did it make any difference whether your employees were in our North Sydney office, their own homes in Perth, Canberra, the Central Coast of NSW or a different suburb of Sydney? The answer has always been - no - there is no difference in using a 'remote' location - the only difference is whether you hire the right person and have the 'management' processes required for both the company and the 'remote employee' to operate as effectively as if they were in the same location. We currently have personnel in all of those different locations and using VoIP and VPN they have the same facilities as every other person who works for Exetel.
Our experiences of hiring graduate engineers in Colombo over what is now almost three years is that Exetel is able to deliver a better service than if we hired only people based on their ability to work from our North Sydney office. We do things very differently from using an "out sourced call centre" and maybe that is why we haven't, to date at least, experienced the problems and issues you see from time to time reported in the Australian media. We currently have ten engineers working in Colombo who handle 100% of all support calls for our ten different services and we will be sending our provisioning manager to Colombo in early January to transfer our provisioning processes.
Once that happens we will have one third of our total personnel located in Colombo and plan for that percentage to further increase over 2009 to slightly over 50% as we transfer further aspects of Exetel's back office processes from North Sydney to Colombo. Unlike the situation reported about Dell we have no doubt whatsoever that the Colombo based personnel will deliver an equal level of service to any personnel we have ever hired in Australia at the equivalent length of time with Exetel and we expect that will continue. As for their command of English and 'accents' - personally speaking - I think they are both better than mine.
One thing is for certain - we wouldn't be able to deliver as good a level of customer service to our continually growing customer base if we hadn't begun the process three years ago of developing the systems and management skills to operate some aspects of our business outside Australia. In providing the lowest cost services to end users there is no getting round the issue that there are a lot better qualified people in other countries who are more than happy to work for double or treble their 'local' salaries (which are still one third of the salaries expected in Australia) which allow far more services to be provided to Australian users than if Australian salaries had to be paid.
Continue reading ""Local" Call Centres Are Better Than Overseas Call Centres?"