US Based vs. Overseas Call Centers

Just an observation from my COMPAQ days. They had call centers here
in the US, but every time you called their standard answer seemed to
be "Re-install Windows." I think CAMPAQ called it a "Full Restore"
basically it used their OS Disk to reload the OS and in the mean time
wipe out everything you hadn't backed up. They didn't bother to tell
you that little fact either.

You can cal a good ole US citizen and get crappy advice or you can
call someone working overseas and get good advice. What you get in
the way of tech support is not a function of where you call.

 

I had my first experience of an overseas Call Centre today!!

Nothing to do with Dell or Computers, but I was contacting my UK Bank.

Had a very noisy & poor quality connection. The Operator continually
kept getting my Name wrong, also was clearly just trying to read from a
script rather than listen/believe what I was telling her!! (Some
Authorisations had changed, without my knowledge/permission, on my
account & I was trying to correct it).

Eventually had to be transferred back to my UK Bank.

Regards,
John

 

To be fair, there is alot of crappy U.S.-based tech support, but my
experiences with Dell's overseas support have been terrible, and I would
never catagorize all, or even most, overseas support as "good". Most of the
"techs" I ended up dealing with gave me the same, lazy, no-brain advice
Compaq gave you. Except that in your case, you could understand at least
25% of what they said...

 

Necessarily.

 

Well...just had to chime in on this issue because I have been on the support
side of it and perhaps it's sour grapes, but...

As a former tech support analyst for HP I personally trained the person that
was taking my job back with him to his home country of India. I was very
good at my job and the customers that I dealt with were all very happy with
the service that I gave them but that wasn't enough to save my job. I can't
fault HP, as they were getting a tech that was making less than a 1/4 of
what I was being paid, so from an economic standpoint, HP was making a wise
business decision. However, I have kept up with things in my former
business unit and not one of the customers that I dealt with has expressed
satisfaction with tech support as it currently stands. They refuse to call
for help because the responding tech is barely intelligible due to the very
thick accents that many of the foreign tech agents have. This is perhaps
the reason that HP is once again hiring American based English speaking
support personnel again, but unfortunately it's for contract work and the
pay is oftentimes 1/2 of what it was 3 years ago.

BTW- the young man I trained was very smart but the learning curve for him
vis a vis computers was very steep. He had very little experience and it
was obvious that this was going to be quite the experience for him and his
customers!

TGunnD

 

You can cal a good ole US citizen and get crappy advice or you can

I had the similar experience in a money transfer computer system in my
old banking job. Although the US tech support people were polite, they
were not helpful if the problem was a bit complicated. That was a 24
hours help line. Tech support people from a far east country would
pick up the line when US was in the evening. Thing got so bad that we
needed to intentionally stay late in the office to wait for the
oversea tech support to pick up the line because the oversea tech
support were much better.

Personally, I don't care much about the tech support has Indian accent
or not. As long as she can give me the information I want, I will pay
attention to what she said. If the first time I don't quite
understand, I will ask again. Of course, if she can speak perfect
English, that will be nice; but I don't think this is absolutely
necessary. Afterall, we are talking about getting tech support, we are
not talking about hiring a language school teacher.

Jay Chan

 

You are wrong for the majority of issues that people call support for.
If all you need is a script based answer then Off-shore is the cheaper
way for the supporting company to do, but if you need some real help,
then you are less likely to get it from an off-shore company.

I've been doing this for more than 20 years and I sent my fair share of
work overseas, but I've moved most of it back to the US. When it comes
to cookie cutter stuff, anywhere will do, but when it comes to
troubleshooting and to being creative then the US people have it hands
down.