The Business of Outsourcing

Call Centers

The typical problems associated with offshoring are the cultural and language barriers that arise in addition to the time zone differences, which make it difficult to communicate and organize meetings effectively. Oftentimes, the outsourcing firms employ poorly qualified agents without the permission or knowledge of its clients. Although India is a largely English speaking population, western critics of offshoring have found issue with the quality and type of service provided due to differences and variations in accent. This is primarily a problem in call centers, where Indian workers must directly interact with customers in the US or Europe. In order to overcome these obstacles, call center agents in India often undergo extensive retraining and learn to adjust their accents to sound more agreeable to their western clientele.

The problems are not limited to the accents, however. Many of the customer service operations, which have moved overseas, have been accused of having employees read from set scripts. Most of these workers are not adequately trained to deal properly with their customers. Various studies have shown that people feel deceived when the agent they are speaking to adopts a fake name and persona just to make them feel more comfortable. Additionally, wait times to reach a service agent appear to have increased due to the automated queuing systems, which are being employed. Dell and other technology companies in particular seem to suffer heavily from these problems, with wait times routinely lasting several hours.