Thoughts on off-shore call centers.

This past weekend, I had trouble with my cable box, so I called Comcast. Troubleshooting went smoothly, and it was determined that my cable box needed to be replaced. No big deal, other than losing about 60 episodes of Big Bang Theory on my DVR.

Well, Jodi was kind enough to stop by the Comcast office in Braintree to do the switcheroo. She brought home the new box and there was a  note on it that I needed to call to activate.

I called the number and after several fruitless rounds of "Hey computer, I'm saying YES, God Dammit!!! Ugh, why can't your artificially intelligent pea brain understand me?!!?" game I finally got to speak to a real live carbon life form. I could digress onto a tangent about there being no need to worry about computers becoming self aware and taking over the planet if they can't even understand simple voice commands, but that's for another time.

His name was "Jesse". Jesse had a very thick accent and judging from the amount of chatter in similarly thick accents in the background, was working in an off-shore call center. Fear not, I will not be launching a xenophobic rant about his script reading, fake name having, clearly "Indian" lackey status.
No. Quite to the contrary, he was professional, courteous and at least proficient enough to get my cable box up and running in a few minutes. He even offered to assist with reprogramming the remote to control my other devices.

This got me thinking back to a conversation I half overheard, and half participated in at work a few weeks back.

The company I work for is a financial services company. We have many lines of business, most of which are serviced by call centers. Until about a year ago, we serviced nearly 7,000 companies and their customers. Last year we purchased one division of a rival company and ingested their issuers clients. Our client base nearly doubled overnight.

Such a sizable merger had its challenges for sure. Not the least of which was a sudden influx of additional call center reps. We already had call centers in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Chicago and Montreal. Now we were taking on their call centers located in several U.S cities, but also one in Manilla and one in India.

Now initially this was all very transparent to the callers. The calls continued to go to the call centers they always went to. Customers were speaking to reps in cities that they had always been calling. As time wore on and more and more companies were ported from their systems to ours, we started cutting back on the so-called "off shore" call centers.

A strange thing happened. As we moved their calls to US call centers, our satisfaction numbers went DOWN. Let me repeat that, the US call centers were getting (significantly) lower ratings across the board. Performance, hold times, wait times, accuracy issues and the like. Basically, bad call center service.

The conversation I was listening to explained it like this, and it's really quite simple. In places like Manilla, and India, Indonesia and the other off-shore locations, Call Center Representative is a legitimate career. Many of the reps in these call centers are paying all the family bills on these salaries. Here in the US, Call Center Representative tends to be an entry level position with relatively poor pay.

Naturally, there is high turnover in these positions. They tend to draw younger workers, in some cases teenagers and young twenty-somethings. Now prepare yourself for a shock: Work is not a priority for most 18-24 year-olds. In fact, if it wasn't for needing to buy things, these youngsters would much rather NOT work.

Generally speaking, the off shore call centers do better in most measurable categories. Satisfaction, accuracy, wait times, hold times, etc. Simply put, they take it more seriously than the majority of their US counterparts. It's because the reps there take their work very seriously, as opposed to the US reps who require a significant amount of supervision to perform even at a barely acceptable level. Other than having thick accents, there is typically no drop off in service, and in fact, there is often an increase in performance, and a reduction in required supervision.

Now, I am not naive, nor do I have any illusions about the reason we focus so heavily on these off shore centers. We pay off shore reps twenty cents to the dollar against US centers, and that can't be ignored in business. But from the business's standpoint, how can you argue with better service for less money?

I know there tends to be a sentiment in this country that "all our jobs are being shipped overseas", but maybe there is a reason for this. I don't know all the details, and I am certainly not an expert in international business, but I do know this: the experiences I have personally had in acting as the helpdesk for these call centers have illustrated clearly which user base is superior.

"Jesse" is a better call center rep than MANY of the ones I've worked with right here in the good ol' US of A.

Common Usage: The Brute Force Attack of language.

Sometimes it seems that the English language, or at least the usage guide for it, is susceptible to brute force attacks.Common usage, or what I like to call repeated misuse, can eventually force the dictionary to acquiesce and accept the misuses as alternate uses.

Case in point: Momentarily. When I was growing up, this word meant lasting for a short time. If you look in the dictionary now, it lists an alternate use of after a period of a moment. Was this always the way, or was the latter added? I blame CVS. Yes, that's right, CVS - the Drugstore. It's a large company, therefore it is powerful. When you call the pharmacy and get placed on hold, they tell you that "someone will be with you momentarily." I think they mean that someone will be with me in a moment. Since people constantly hear this from what they view to be a reputable source, they think it must be right.

There are other examples too: T.V. personality Bear Grylls uses the word disorientated constantly. The word I think he means to use is disoriented. At first, he was the only person I heard using that word. Then one day at work, a coworker said it. My coworker is also British, so now I was wondering if it's a Brit thing.

Looking it up in the dictionary reveals that it is a "real" word. I still don't buy it.It's got an extra syllable. I write it off as the same linguistic loophole that allows them to add an extra syllable to aluminum. They pronounce it Al-you-min-ee-um. See that? An extra syllable. There is no  I after the first N. That last syllable is UM. Period. End of discussion.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for new words making their way into the dictionary, cause it allows more flexibility in Scrabble and Words With Friends. I've gotten a lot of mileage from Za.

Sometime, we can talk about the words that people use WRONG, but that haven't yet made it into the Dictionary. I'm looking at you, Alanis Morissette.

Welcome to my new blog, IDSTIDSIWISWIDSTISI. That's short for "I didn't say that I didn't say it, what I said was I didn't say that I said it." It's an old favorite quote from an anonymous politician.

To tell the truth, it was the theme of a Sunday Boston Globe crossword puzzle I did about 20 years ago. You know, the long answer that spans the whole puzzle? When I solved the puzzle, I was happy enough. It wasn't a particularly good or even memorable puzzle, but for some reason, I remember this line.

As this blog, like most blogs, is mostly just the nonsensical rantings of my lunatic mind, I couldn't think of a better title.

Mostly I will post whatever's on my mind. Sometimes, it will be (hopefully) thought provoking, other times (more likely) irreverent. I may bitch, I may congratulate. I may ask, I may inform. I may thank, I may list my top five side one/track ones. Mostly I hope to write and maybe even entertain a little.

Tonight is mostly about introductions. It's my first entry, so I will keep it brief.

Thanks for reading and chat soon!

F100d50

p.s. F100d50 is leetspeak for Floodso (pronounced flood-zo). Floodso was my older brother Mark's nickname growing up. Since his death in 2005, I sort of adopted it. I use it as a screen name for most apps.