Bar said:
I agree with you Von Luck.
I buy what I believe to be uk based goods and services. I therefore expect to deal with uk based personnel who can speak proper English. (This goes for workers in call centres in the uk as well!)
It is purely about profitability and customer services be damned. It has had a small impact upon retentions for some companies but the increased revenues easily compensates for it.
The thing is, a very large percentage of customers of large organisations like bans, utility companies etc, want a first class service but
don't want to pay for it.
Take a very small-scale example - Intuit software. When Intuit reduced the suport levels that were included with their accountancy software (and this is businerss software, not home software), and put most support on a chargeab;e basis, there was a furore. But think about it. Much of that support was for people too bone=lazy to open the manual and work out the solution for themselves. Instead, they expect to be able to pick up a phone and have an expert explain it, and they want it for free. Well, the world doesn't work like that. You might be surprised how many support customers will admit that they haven't bothered the read the manual, because it's easier to pick up the phone. Fine ..... but pay for it!
As an Intuit customer, I want to pay for the software I use, and for
not hand-holding for lazy idiots. And, one way or another, that support has to be for. If it isn't provided on a chargeable basis, it is either built-in to the cost of the software, or it isn't provided at all. So why should I pay, in the software cost, to support people that either aren't capable of working it out themselves, or RTFMing?
That same basic logic can be extended to utility companies. Providing support has a cost attached. Do you want higher bills, or do you want companies to try to reduce costs? Either answer is fair enough, but be aware that UK support operations have a cost attached, and it has to come from somewhere.
Personally, I hate off-shore support. I'd much rather have local support and am prepared to pay for it. Why should it be shareholders? Why not the people using it?
So would you rather have off-shore support, or local support on a chargeable basis? Because if it's local, one way or another, you
are going to end up paying for it.
Perhaps you ought to regard the off-shore suppoert operations as an experiment designed to reduce costs, not just one aimed at increasing profits, because the two factors, along with customer prices, are tightly integrated. Oh, and by the way, off-shore support is an experiment slowly but increasingly seen as a failure. Good. It'll come back where it should be. Just be prepared for prices to rise to pay for it.
), it's outsourcing itself.![[DOD]Asprilla](/styles/overclockers/avatars/8.png){kind=avatar}