John Linton
....because you outsource Australian jobs to illiterate monkeys in India who can't speak English". (direct quote from an email I received earlier this morning).
Far too much has been been made, in the Australian media, of the current nonsense in the Indian media about how unsafe Indian students are in Australia because Australians are racists - apparently this will cause a lot of Indian students to go to other countries to obtain their tertiary qualifications rather spending the money charged in Australia. Nothing like a media beat up to produce negative results for all and sundry. Having come to Australia as a migrant some years before the first fleet arrived I can state without equivocation that Australia, or the parts of it I have seen over the decades, was very definitely 'racist' in a variety of relatively benign ways but, in my opinion, has become less benignly racist as the overall proportion, and sources, of migrants to 'born in Australia' Australians has increased.
Now my pig ignorant correspondent of this morning tends to demonstrate the truth of this observation. Firstly Exetel don't "outsource" anything including jobs. We have invested a considerable sum of money (for us) in setting up a wholly owned subsidiary company in Colombo, Sri Lanka where we directly employ and train and manage our own staff, currently 45 but growing, to provide services to Australian residential customers. As noted that office is in Sri Lanka - not India. When we commenced this program in June 2008 Exetel employed around 30 people in Australia and today we employ 45 people in Australia and that number continues to grow at a rate of 2% to 4% per month and is planned to do so each month of 2010.
Exetel, like every sensible commercial or, for that matter, non-commercial enterprise constantly examines ways of keeping its costs at the lowest possible level. Our major costs are customer connectivity set by Australian based carriers (irrespective of their ownership) and we can do little about addressing those issues. Our second major cost is International bandwidth where, because there is more competition, we can do something about those costs - and we do by constant re-negotiation. Our third largest expense is personnel costs where we can control much of those costs by astute hiring of really good people and then creating an environment where we can encourage a higher quality on the job performance than that achieved by any of our competitors.
One major personnel issue we never successfully addressed in the four years prior to establishing an office in Sri Lanka was to keep degree qualified engineers interested in providing residential customer support for more than around twelve months either as a CSR or in taking a supervisory/management career path in customer service. Not unnaturally university engineering graduates in Australia want to go on and become 'network engineers' or 'sys admins' rather than continuing to stay in what they see as 'entry level positions'. So, as a small but continually growing company we hired good engineers into CSR roles and then allowed them to move to 'more interesting' positions in other areas of Exetel. My observation over 20 years is that is a common issue in the various support centres I have been associated with. This meant and means that retaining knowledge and skill in customer support is a perpetual problem.
A, not very good, solution was to pay good, degree qualified, customer support engineers double what they could earn in any other 'more interesting' job and you could get two years out of them as a CSR but no more than that. The solution we came up with, a much better solution, was go to another country where we could pay good, degree qualified, engineers three to four times what they could earn in any 'more interesting' job and thus be able to retain their services as a highly competent CSR for 3 -4 years before they moved on. We have done that and if you look at the qualifications of the engineering, billing and provisioning personnel Exetel is lucky enough to employ in Sri Lanka you will see how successful this operation is:
http://www.exetel.com.au/staff-sl.php
in terms of hiring degree qualified people. You can't see from that listing how long the people hired on this basis stay with Exetel but the first two 'experimental' SL engineers we hired on a work from home basis almost four years ago are still with us - one as a shift supervisor the other as a team leader.
We have, of course, got a very long way to go in fully developing the potentialities that are now available to us but the issue of not being able to retain highly qualified people is a thing of the past. It is also a major bonus that Sri Lanka has a Buddhist culture and that cultural characteristic is a major, major plus for people who have to try and assist unhappy people - particularly too many 'Australians' whose "me before everyone else and that better be right now a***hole" has always been very difficult to deal with.
There are some very, very stupid people in Australia - the email I referred to previously indicates just how stupid people can be and also the reference to "monkeys" indicates how racist more 'Australians' than you might think are. (this word is used frequently by some particularly stupid Australians quite openly as can be seen from this moronic would be Exetel customer's public forum postings):
http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=288&t=35020
Running a residential customer support service in Australia would be as stupid as running the network to provide the internet connection by buying IP from Telstra rather than Verizon (a US company) or Optus (a Singapore company) - all that would happen is that the end user would be asked to pay more for their service which would mean Exetel would not exist at all and 45 Australians would lose their jobs.
While I still think Australia's 'racism' is usually more tribal loyalty than xenophobia there appear to be an increasing occurrence of the latter.