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.