← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Centinel
Thread ID: 11249 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-11-24
2003-11-24 22:47 | User Profile
Finally, a mainstream news article describing what we've known all along...Middle America doesn't like talking to Habeeb for tech support!
[url]http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/aptech_story.asp?category=1700&slug=Dell%20Call%20Centers[/url]
Monday, November 24, 2003 ÷ Last updated 1:23 p.m. PT
Dell to stop using tech support in India
By APRIL CASTRO ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
AUSTIN, Texas -- After an onslaught of complaints, direct sales computer king Dell Inc. has stopped routing corporate customers to a technical support call center in Bangalore, India.
Tech support for Optiplex desktop and Latitude notebook computers will be handled from call centers in Texas, Idaho and Tennessee, Dell spokesman Jon Weisblatt told The Associated Press Monday.
"Customers weren't satisfied with the level of support they were receiving, so we're moving some calls around to make sure they don't feel that way anymore," Weisblatt said.
The development was first reported Saturday by the Austin American-Statesman.
Weisblatt would not discuss the nature of the dissatisfaction, but some U.S. customers have complained that Indian support operators are difficult to communicate with because of thick accents and scripted responses.
Dell is one of a number of high-tech companies that has in recent years moved jobs offshore to India and other developing nations for the cheaper labor, which in Dell's case helps keep down the cost of providing round-the-clock support.
Corporate customers account for about 85 percent of Dell's business, with only 15 percent coming from the consumer market. Consumer callers won't see a change in technical support, Weisblatt said.
He said Dell has no plans to scale back resources at the Bangalore call center or change employment plans in the United States, although he would not comment on specifics.
Worldwide, Dell employs about 44,300 people. About 54 percent are located abroad.
Among Dell customers dissatisfied with the company's use of overseas labor is Ronald Kronk, a Presbyterian minister in Rochester, Pa., who has spent the last four months trying to resolve a miscommunication that has resulted in his being billed for two computers.
The problem, he says, is that the Dell call center is in India.
"They're extremely polite, but I call it sponge listening - they just soak it in and say 'I can understand why you're angry' but nothing happens," Kronk said.
Kronk has been credited for the second computer, but still faces late charges on a balance he said he never owed.
"Every time I see a Dell commercial on TV, I just cringe. They make it sound so easy and it's been a nightmare," Kronk said. "I even said to them once that I'd like to speak to someone in the U.S. They gave me a number but it's a recording and I can't speak to a human being."
In trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Dell shares were up 62 cents, or nearly 2 percent, to close at $35.14.
2003-11-25 08:35 | User Profile
---------------<<<>>>--------------- JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER by Rob Sanchez [url]www.ZaZona.com[/url] ---------------<<<>>>---------------
Recent news describes a revelation by Dell Inc. that offshoring their customer service to India might not be such a hot idea after all. Before we break out the champagne and cheer their new patriotism, let's look at what Dell is actually saying:
The new U.S. employees will provide phone-based tech support
for business customers, which account for the bulk of Dell's
revenue. Dell employees in India have been answering some of
those calls. Calls from individual customers will still be
routed to call centers in India.
Dell says that it will offer U.S. based support for business customers only. All other Dell customers will still have to contend with Dell's Indian customer support. Don't think for a second that Dell intends on keeping even a small portion of their customer support in the USA. Gary Cotshott, vice president of Dell's services division said, "Sometimes, we move a little too far, too fast." Translated, that means that Dell will offshore those jobs as soon as they can train their foreign workers with skills comparable to the average American support personnel. Typically companies like Dell accomplish this training by importing L-1 visa holders to their US office in order to get learn how to handle the job. Once they are up to snuff, they will be shipped back to India. Any jobs created in Austin will be temporary but the job-loss will be permanent once the nonimmigrants go home.
Steve Felice, vice president of Dell's corporate business division, said that it's unclear how many jobs the move might create in Central Texas. The Austin Statesman journalist should have asked how many of those jobs will go to American citizens because creating jobs for nonimmigrants won't help the unemployed in Texas.
So just whom is Dell hiring instead of Texans? Over the weekend, I talked to a Chinese national who was recently hired with an H-1B visa to work in Dell's Austin division. Xing came to the U.S. on a student visa, and upon graduation Dell converted the visa to an H-1B. Xing said that it was easy to get a job at Dell because there are lots of Chinese friends already working there. Xing winked and said, "Think about it. They don't call themselves 'Dell Computers', they call it 'Dell Inc.'".
Don't think for a minute that Xing is happy being a Dell H-1B. Xing voiced numerous complaints about the heavy pressure and long hours at Dell. Things are so bad that Xing would like to quit in a couple of years and work for somebody else. I resisted the temptation to inform Xing that it's unlikely other American companies will treat H-1Bs any better.
(Xing's name is fictional to protect against Dell retribution)
[url]http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/11/23/0152247&mode=thread&tid[/url] =85
Dell brings some tech-support back home
Monday November 24, 2003 - [ 02:00 PM GMT ]
Topics: Business
By: Joe Barr
The Austin American-Statesman reported on Friday that Dell intends to return most of its tech support to the homeland. According to that report and others, home consumers' calls to Dell tech support will still be routed to India but calls for assistance from corporate customers will once more be handled in the U.S.
As we reported last month, many longtime Dell customers have been angered by the poor response times as well as poor support offered by tech support based in India. In that story, we predicted that customers might revolt, saying, "...it remains to be seen if customers will stick with Dell (or anyone else) when the service and quality they expect gets cut. Outsourced or not, short-term savings or not, horrible tech support is
not going to prove beneficial to Dell in the long term."
It appears that Dell has been hearing the same sort of complaints that we did. Both language and knowledge seemed to be problems for these customers. This action by Dell shows they are listening.
The American-Statesman story quotes Dell vice-president of Dell's services division Gary Cotshott as saying, "We felt a little noise and angst from our customers, and we decided to make some changes." The story also asserts that, for the most part, in spite of the backlash like that reported in our story, companies are continuing to send jobs overseas.
The Dell move reverses a trend begun at the company when the bottom began to fall out of the tech market three years ago, and tech support calls were shifted to less expensive labor markets. It remains to be seen if this move is a temporary reversal or the start of a new trend. But in any case, while home consumers will still suffer from the poor level of tech support resulting from the language and knowledge problems in India, business customers can rejoice that the hardware side of the PC cost equation is not a monopoly. If it were, there would have been no such reversal, no matter how loud the squeals of complaint.
[url]http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/dell/1122dell.html[/url]
Dell sending some jobs back to U.S.
Corporate customer complaints prompt the change.
By Amy Schatz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, November 21, 2003
In a surprising about-face, Dell Inc. is moving some technical-support jobs back from India to the United States.
The new U.S. employees will provide phone-based tech support for business customers,which account for the bulk of Dell's revenue. Dell employees in India have been answering some of those calls. Calls from individual customers will still be routed to call centers in India.
"We felt a little noise and angst from our customers, and we decided to make some changes," said Gary Cotshott, vice president of Dell's services division. "Sometimes, we move a little too far, too fast."
The computer company's quiet reversal comes as many U.S. companies are rushing to outsource operations to India and other low-cost developing nations. It suggests that the savings achieved by moving jobs overseas may sometimes be outweighed by the cost of antagonizing loyal customers.
"What (customers) said was, 'You guys have been changing some things, and we don't like it as much,' " said Steve Felice, vice president of Dell's corporate business division.
It's unclear how many jobs the move might create in Central Texas, where Dell operates several call centers for tech support and sales and employs 16,500 people overall. Dell executives would say only that jobs will be added at call centers across the United States. Dell's other U.S. tech support call centers are in Nashville, Tenn., and Twin Falls, Idaho.
Dell was among the first large U.S. companies to move tech-support jobs to cheaper Indian call centers when technology spending plummeted three years ago.
The list of companies sending jobs to India now includes Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Computer Sciences Corp.
English-speaking Indian workers are highly educated but earn a fraction of American salaries. Some customers have complained they can't understand Indian workers because of their accents and that tech-support workers rely too heavily on scripted answers.
Despite the escalating backlash, companies continue to send jobs overseas.
A recent Stanford University study estimates that Indian call centers have picked up 200,000 jobs since March 2002. Gartner Inc., the tech research firm, estimates that U.S. information technology companies will move one in 10 jobs offshore by the end of the year.
Dell's move "doesn't surprise me, but I don't see a broad trend to do that," said Ned May, an analyst with IDC, a tech research firm. "There's been so much attention to this that people have moved pretty aggressively. Hiccups were expected along the way."
Some companies have seen a small but definite decline in customer satisfaction. Yet executives have concluded that the cost savings are worth it, said Steve Lane, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group research firm.
"It's certainly fair to say that there's a general backlash against the idea of jobs going offshore," Lane said.
Dell executives left open the possibility that tech support for corporate customers could be shifted overseas again, if technical expertise and language skills improve there.
"I don't think we're ruling that out," said Jon Weisblatt, a Dell spokesman.
Nevertheless, Dell's about-face could provide at least a little "I told you so" comfort for Dell technical-support employees in Central Texas who were laid off in 2001. Dell cut 5,700 jobs that year, most of them in Central Texas, as the high-tech slowdown began.
Dell's worldwide work force has grown since then - from 34,600 at the end of 2001 to 44,300 now - but the growth has been heavily overseas.
In 2001, almost 68 percent of the company's work force was in the United States. Early this year, that figure had dropped to about 54 percent.
That trend continues: Last quarter, 56 percent of the 2,500 jobs Dell added worldwide were outside the United States, Canada and Latin America.
One reason Dell's employment has grown outside the United States is that the company is selling more PCs and other products globally, particularly in countries such as China and Germany.
Dell officials stressed that the company will continue to add jobs overseas as as its global business grows.
Dell's ambition to become a $60 billion-a-year company helps explain its responsiveness to the complaints of business customers.
The company wants businesses, schools and governments that currently use Dell Optiplex desktop PCs and Latitude notebooks to also buy advanced computers, such as servers or storage systems. Dell makes a bigger profit on those systems, which are supported by techs in the United States. It can't afford to antagonize its most profitable customers with poor support for PCs.
"Our corporate customers have come to expect a certain level of expertise," Cotshott said.
[email]aschatz@statesman.com[/email]; 912-5932
[url]http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/2242314[/url]
Nov. 24, 2003, 2:26PM
Dell to bring some jobs back home
Cox News Service
AUSTIN -- In a surprising about-face, Dell is returning some technical-support jobs from India to the United States.
The new U.S. employees will provide phone-based tech support for business customers. Dell employees in India have been answering some of those calls. Calls from individual customers will still be routed to call centers in India.
"We felt a little noise and angst from our customers, and we decided to make some changes," said Gary Cotshott, vice president of Dell's services division. "Sometimes, we move a little too far, too fast."
Dell's reversal comes as many U.S. companies are rushing to outsource operations to India and other nations with low labor costs. It suggests the savings some achieved by moving jobs overseas may sometimes be outweighed by the cost of antagonizing loyal customers.
It's unclear how many jobs the move might create in Central Texas, where Round Rock-based Dell operates several call centers for tech support and sales and employs 16,500 people. Dell's other U.S. tech support call centers are in Nashville, Tenn., and Twin Falls, Idaho.
Dell was among the first large U.S. companies to move tech-support jobs to cheaper call centers in India when technology spending plummeted three years ago. The list now includes Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard and Computer Sciences Corp.
English-speaking Indian workers are highly educated but earn a fraction of American salaries. Some customers have complained they can't understand Indian workers because of their accents and that tech support workers rely too heavily on scripted answers.
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2003-11-30 14:15 | User Profile
Indians indignant, Americans angered as Dell dithers The Economist magazine Sunday, November 30, 2003
So charged have the politics of offshoring become that reports that Dell might move a handful of tasks from its call centers in India back to America have quickly escalated into a diplomatic incident.
Indignant Indians are fuming at the suggestion that it was their ''thick accents'' and ''scripted responses'' that persuaded Texas-based Dell to move some customer-service jobs for its corporate customers back to America.
In America, protectionist pressure groups are claiming the first victory in a long campaign to bring jobs back home. Even Dell seems divided by the issue. Different statements from different company officials have left outsiders wondering what, exactly, the company plans to do.
On Nov. 22, the Austin American-Statesman ran a story claiming that Dell would be moving some technical-support jobs from India back to its call centers in Texas. Two days later, the Associated Press confirmed the story.
The reason for the move, according to a Dell spokesman quoted by the AP, was that ''customers weren't satisfied with the level of support they were receiving.''
The following day, a brusque-sounding official at Dell India in Bangalore denied the story. ''No, we are not shifting the work,'' the spokesperson told PTI, an Indian news agency. As the mystery deepened, further reports suggested Dell's ''full commitment'' to India, where it employs 2,000 people, and explained all job shifts (if indeed there had been any) as ''part of Dell's normal business operations.''
Dell laid off 5,700 workers during the recent tech recession, most of them support staff in Texas. Most of the growth in its work force since then has been overseas. It may be that its customer service has become genuinely poorer as a result --- though multiregional, multiracial America has its fair share of accents, too.
Dell may be the victim of well-organized e-mail and bulletin-board campaigns by pressure groups and customers who have allowed their politics to cloud their judgment. Which customers, after all, can claim happy experiences with Texas call centers? By using Indian ones, Dell does at least keep its computers cheap --- which is the main point about its products.
Those Indians who are not now desperately practicing their Texan drawl, meanwhile, have begun to plot their revenge. ''Imagine what would happen if we moved our techies out of the U.S. back into India,'' wonders Arunava Sinha, in a column for the Economic Times of India. ''Oops. There went Silicon Valley.''
é 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
[url=http://www.ajc.com/sunday/content/epaper/editions/sunday/issue_f39c95b684e052ff0075.html]http://www.ajc.com/sunday/content/epaper/editions/sunday/issue_f39c95b684e052ff0075.html[/url]
This reads like something that Rban wrote.
Yes, I can imagine what would happen. These companies would have to rehire the American engineers that they laid off during the real "decade of greed" in the '90 and pay them a salary that matches their skills. Instead of companies like Microsoft giving so much money for self serving charities like raising the educational level of Indians, they would better serve everyone by using the money to hire Americans and if it means the top managment has to do with less money, then too damn bad.
2003-11-30 17:31 | User Profile
As if Dell made any machines worth using anyway...
2003-11-30 17:52 | User Profile
Dell needs to be boycotted, 1) because it is loyal to the NWO and disloyal to the republic and 2) Michael Dell is an active tribalist...you might as well be sending your money to AIPAC or ZOA when you buy a Dell