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The Emotions of Offshoring If you’ve recently had to contact customer service or technical support, you might have experienced “offshoring” first hand. Instead of talking to Jenny in Florida or Jim in Utah, you find yourself talking to Deep in Delhi or Kash in Bangalore. Because customer service represents the front lines of any service business, these interactions matter a lot to a company’s performance, in terms of cost, quality, and repeat business. Offshoring introduces a new emotional component into an already complex conversation – every time a caller in the US or Europe talks to a person in India or the Philippines, the interaction itself provides tangible evidence that the service work that used to be done domestically has now been exported. I’ve recently had two very different kinds of interactions with Indian call centers; one made me feel good, the other made me feel a bit queasy. In both of my experiences, the quality of the service I received was excellent – it was the features surrounding the transaction that were so different.
American Express has a large call center in Delhi. The employees there are enthusiastic about the center and eager to talk about offshoring. “All sorts of companies from the US are here,” says Pradeep, in perfect English. “J C Penney is across the street … Dell is down the road. Since India has opened its economy to foreign investment, we’ve seen lots of American companies set up centers here. It’s great to talk with people from the US.”
“American Express is a global company,” Pradeep continued, “We have customers around the world, and operations centers around the world as well. We do a good deal of work in the Philippines, and, of course, in the United States.”
Pradeep’s approach implies a reciprocal obligation for his customers: if American Express is a global company, we should be prepared to be global consumers. This means welcoming high quality service, no matter where it is located.
Intuit also appears to have a technical support center in India, but when I asked Sanjay, the person helping me, where he was located, he said: “for security reasons, I can’t tell you where I’m located.”
This seemed like such an evasive and unconventional response that I was momentarily stunned into silence. It left me wondering what Intuit was hiding. As a customer, countless interactions with phone reps have conditioned me to accept that first name and location provide enough accountability for my transactions. For Intuit, this is no longer an accepted approach. But how can knowing that Sanjay is in Bangalore (or in India, for that matter) possibly be a security issue?
Immediately after Sanjay had rung off the line, a computer monitoring system took over the call and asked me to rate my experience with Sanjay on a 7 point scale. I had the eerie feeling that my opinion mattered too much; that my quick and cursory rating of Sanjay’s effectiveness in solving my problem was really going to make a difference, in his pay and perhaps even in his employment. I gave him a 6.
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Offshoring makes spectacular business sense. The telecommunications infrastructure is in place – calls to Delhi sound just like calls to Atlanta. The management infrastructure is there as well. Even if you are a small service business, large third party providers in India like Wipro or Infosys can give you a virtual call center at costs that are less than one third the costs of running one in the US or Europe. For all I know, “Sanjay” at “Intuit” is actually employed by another company, and he handles calls for Microsoft and Oracle as well. If you’re a US CEO discussing offshoring to your stockholders, it can make for some difficult moments. On the one hand, your investors say: 'get the best return you can on the money I'm giving you,' which pushes the company towards offshoring. On the other hand, your employees and communities say: 'you can't leave us, after all we've done for you,' which pushes the company away from offshoring. I recently heard GE’s Jeff Immelt try to tackle this issue in front of several hundred GE stockholders. Immelt walked this fine line, assuring his audience both that “GE is an American company,” and that “we’ll get the best return we can on your investment in us.” If call-center locations really matter to customers, we might expect companies to begin to differentiate themselves by highlighting “in-country customer support.” This would be the service equivalent of manufactured goods that carry the sticker: “proudly made in the USA.” I don’t think customers will pay more for in-country customer support. If the same service can be performed at considerably less expense in India or the Philippines, that’s where it will find its way. Personally, I find it exciting and beneficial to be able to interact productively with people half a world away by dialing a toll-free number. Companies would do well to embrace the example set by American Express, and take pride in their offshore service centers, as opposed to trying to hide their location. For more information:
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