[Discuss] WRT Dell trashing their own reputation by offshoring support to India [Was: Justify your existence]

[Jerry Feldman]

On 12/17/2011 11:55 AM, MBR wrote:
> After Dell fired their U.S. support people and outsourced the function
> to India, I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation
> with their support people.  During my calls to them over the first few
> years after they did that, I naively assumed the support people were
> technically knowledgeable, and I continued trying to engage them in
> technical conversation to solve my problem, but that was always
> impossible. 
My experience with Dell was very spotty since I have no Dell stuff, and
it was only for a friend or client.
"I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with their
support people"
This is the key. You want to be able to have an intelligent conversation
with a support person and to be able to understand. I had a few times to
contact Compaq support (before HP). I found back then that the Indians
were much more technically competent that the non-Indians. On a single
issue, I had a couple of US people who gave me the wrong answers, where
when I spoke to an Indian, he gave me exactly what fixed the problem.

First, many people have trouble with some foreign accents, and I believe
that this was one of the major Dell user complaints. Whoever you speak
to should be reasonably articulate and easily understandable.
Second, the person should be knowledgeable enough to either identify and
solve your problem or escalate it to someone who does.

My recent conversation with the RCN customer service person was that he
told me:
1. While I paid for a "static IP", since you had only a single static IP
it was only a sticky and he refused to budge.
2. We were paying for an 8-IP subnet not a single static.
The issue comes under that category of intelligent conversation. I had
the bill in my hand. What they failed to do was to move the subnet over
from the 20/2 DOCSIS 1 modem to the DOCSIS 3 modem as was required by
the contract. My problem is I had a SonicWall that could only be
programmed by our IT department. The only thing I could have done was to
do a factory reset, get it on some working network, and then let IT
reprogram it.  I told him that, but I didn't tell him that I had 2 other
networks in the same computer room. In any case they finally fixed the
problem after I yelled and screamed.

The bottom line is it does not matter where the support people are. It
is a matter of training.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id:3BC1EB90 
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