perils of outsourcing

[Ivo Skoric]

Lou Dobbs is right. Outsourcing sucks. All the big US corporations 
are strong on sales, yet pitifully weak on customer service. Once 
they sell you the product, you are on your own. Then you usually find 
yourself grasping for the air in the sea of fine print, the untold 
stories, or just the plain old lies of the salesperson. I don't know 
who is worse - Verizon, Adelphia, Earthlink, Sprint, .... - but as a 
customer I was taken for granted at some point by each one of them. 
Verizon sells you DSL service with free modem. Only you have to pay 
$100 up-front for the modem, and then there is not a single piece of 
information on the rebate in the package they send you. Of course 
there is one toll-free number with the byzantine voice-recognition 
system on the other side, which is plain discriminative to the people 
with accent. Once you reach the human on the other side, the poor 
fellow doesn't know better but to put you on hold and transfer you to 
another department, where, guess what, they transfer you to yet 
another. All in all you can ask for the rebate only after 30 days, 
calling them, filing out the paperwork - the hassle is obviously 
intentional so that people forget or have no time or are discouraged 
to get their $100 back. Earthlink will gladly sell you their service, 
but then comes Saturday morning and everyone and their mother dials 
up, and the service is improbably slow, e-mail impossible to download 
or send, because their capacity simply cannot handle the amount of 
traffic. Yet when you call them, their technical support will 
immediately accuse your computer of wrongdoing and 'guide' you 
through an hour of useless troubleshooting (endless rebooting) of 
your perfectly sound system. Who knows where those support people, 
that barely know a computer from dishwaher once the problem exceeds 
their script, are really located. For example, the support people for 
my Toshiba laptop are in Istambul, Turkey. I even thought of bringing 
my wife's friend to help with translation when I recently had a 
problem. The repair center, however, is in Louisville, KY. And when 
you want to know the status of the repair, which is done in Kentucky, 
you have to call Turkey (of course you have no idea, because of the 
toll-free number). Toshiba, improbably, at least runs this smooth. 
Which can't be said for HP-Compaq. Their support people are in India. 
Yesterday, another friend of my wife had her Compaq Presario die on 
her. When she boots it up, the scandisk starts scanning the disk and 
the computer freezes at 15% of the scan, indicating possible physical 
damage to the hard disk. Of course, she doesn't have a back-up, and 
she has some very important proposal file, that she has been working 
on for weeks, on that hard disk. She called Compaq tech support 
first, spent 2 hours with them on phone and on hold, only to learn 
that she needs a new hard disk, and that she can kiss her data good-
bye. Then she called my wife and got to speak to me - in about 30 
minutes she was able to boot the computer in the ms-dos mode, list 
her directories, find her proposal and save it on the floppy disk. 
Should I bill Compaq for my time? I think it would be only fair, 
since I am underemployed here in the US. How much are those kids in 
India paid? And they obviously know less about the matter than I 
do...

ivo