Tech Support From India - WHY?!

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Don't get me wrong, I love India, I love Indian culture and history, I love Indian food, and I personally know a lot of cool Indian people. But for the love of God, why does customer tech support for every single piece of technological hardware, every software program, etc. have to be in the hands of Indians living in India? Yes, I know the rationale is companies just want to be cheap and pay people who are willing to work for 10 cents per hour in positions that usually pay $10 - $20 per hour in the US. Yes, I know Indians are very technology-oriented and make great programmers and analysts. However, it's beyond me why tech companies think it's a good idea to outsource customer service to people who can barely even speak english (or any other language other than native Indian dialects for that matter) to resolve relatively complex issues. I personally abhor calling tech support for ANYTHING because I know it's going to take at least 30 minutes to sometimes well over an hour to resolve something that should only take five minutes tops to resolve just because I'm going around in circles due to a language barrier. Obviously I'm not the only person who thinks this way because if you go to any consumer complaint site, you will see endless complaints about customer service for tech companies (especially HP).

This is EXACTLY how I feel:
[youtube] Mod. edit: video redacted because it contains unfiltered swearwords. [/youtube]

Cheap labor increases the profit margin.

Once the product is sold, customer service becomes a joke.

Think about it. If support is bad, you won't call, so they'll have to provide less support.

They don't really care about customers. All they care about is getting our money.

Greed is the culprit

By and large, they actually do not make great programmers, at least not the ones that are given work for the specific reason that they are cheap labor. Those ones need to have their hands held and usually produce the minimum that actually works (for that week until it fails).

Here's a laugh... I worked for tech support here in Canada and many (close to half) of my colleagues were Indian-born and had thick accents - some so bad you could barely understand them IN PERSON.

I overheard a customer conversation at least twice where the frustrated agent was raising his voice into the phone, "No I am not in Indeeaa. NOaa! Iyem not in Eendiaa - Iyam in Canada!"

...I leaned in close to the headset and said, "It's true! This is definitely Canada!"

The drive to outsource everything to India has left a gaping hole in customer service. When my bank decided to outsource to India I started getting calls from them asking me to tell them my account number! I told the bank and they said it is a training issue.

Outsourcing programming to India is not done simply because it is cheap. It is done because business managers in the west feel uncomfortable managing a function they do not understand (software development). So they send it half way across the world and think "out of sight out of mind".

It is a foolish thing for an organization to send the core function of any software development project to the other side of the world. I worked as an analyst managing outsourced projects, and generally the development work done is poor and has to be sent back several times for them to get it right.

Call centres should be banned anyway. There are a cruel, underpaid and dehumanising form of employment.

Not to mention ableist. If you are autistic and work in a call centre and expect to get transferred to a non customer interaction orientated role, think again.

Technology companies should improve the user friendliness and FAQ sections of their websites. Perhaps include an AI answerbot for miscellaneous questions.

Riddle me this oh ye harsh judges.

When you buy something don't you look for the lesser price, all other things being equal?

ruveyn

if anything, it shows the 'invisible hand of the market' is a crock of s**t.

Libertarians argue that competition should increase the quality of goods and services but the imperical evidence shows otherwise. Naomi Klein said in 'No Logo' that in designer products, you're paying for the brand name, not the quality of good or service. I suspect thats what you're seeing here.