North American Network Operators Group
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Re: What to do when your ISP off-shores tech support

  • From: Matthew Moyle-Croft
  • Date: Fri Dec 26 17:43:02 2008
Martin Hannigan wrote: 

I'm not sure if I support off shoring or not as
related to quality, but there is certainly a a business case to to be made
supporting it as this thread ending up pointing out. There are trade offs
which matter more to some than others.

I'm quite fascinated by some of the examples given of "offshoring". Cisco use Sydney as one of their locations for around the world coverage. From our point of view (being Australians) this isn't offshore - we have a local TAC who are closer and we tend to be able to get the same group of SP TAC people everytime to deal with our issues. My experience is that, given global companies like Cisco rely on locations to provide wide language support to people everywhere that the language issue is a bit moot. Some people in the Belgium TAC are easier to understand over the phone then people in the US TAC because the US TAC people have been employed for their Spanish skills or other language skills where as many Europeans have better English skills than, well, a lot of people. Some of the people in the TAC in Australia don't have English as their first language and are tricky to explain why my GSR crashed with an IPv6 issue over the phone (but fine via email). Some people on the other end of the phone just suck no matter which country or land of origin.

(I use Cisco's TAC as an example purely because I'm familar - but the example can be reused).

I think offshoring is more an issue because often it's built around a lie. If I'm talking to someone in another country, then I'm okay with that but I hate it when they're forced to lie about who they are and where they are. They're representing a company I deal with and as a customer I want it to be a good experience - if a company doesn't care about the overall customer experience and looks at it as a cost to be squashed and reduced then that (as someone else has said) is really the problem. Give them the tools and desire to help me as a customer no matter where they are or which god they pray to.

The offshoring I think can be a problem isn't the customer facing part, but the anonymous part where backends of companies are taken offshore where data privacy laws etc aren't the same and suddenly my private data can be compromised in a way that is out of control of the laws of the country where I live. (I'm thinking banks, health care etc).

Matthew