Backlash Against Overseas Answering Services

One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make is looking and acting small. This is true whether you are a small business soliciting retail customers, but it's even more important if you are a small business calling on large corporate customers. The universal truth is, "big likes big."

There is overwhelming evidence that customers have a negative opinion of any business that uses an overseas or foreign call center, whether it be for customer service, technical support, and simply for after hour answering service functions.

Today, India is still the number one country in the world for hosting call centers of all kinds, not just technical support, with at least 80% of the overseas call center market from India. It all started back in the middle of the technology dot-com boom of the late nineties, where companies figured out they could save as much as 50% using a foreign answering service for customer service or tech support.

The problem is, quality control quickly broke down and there are few people in the U.S. that own a computer or a piece of electronics that have not had a terrible experience with one of these foreign call centers. On a call by call basis, 90% of the callers may be satisfied after the call, but this is a business where one dreadful experience can turn a customer off, almost for life.

If you are a regular passenger on an airline, and you have a close call on a landing, you may never fly again. The same is true here. When a customer calls the 800 number on the back of an owners manual and they hear “an Indian accent” they probably recall the day they spent 6 hours on the phone attempting to re-install their computer’s operating system after a crash or the 5 callbacks needed for find satisfaction on a refund. One nightmare experience can turn someone off permanently.

The problem is so bad that many companies today are going out of their way to advertise to existing and potential customers that they have a call center right here in the United States as a leg up on their competition with call centers established overseas for many years. Jitterbug Corporation, a company that advertises how easy their phones are to use, mostly to appeal to older consumers, uses this exact language on their website.

At Jitterbug, our live, friendly Operators are based entirely in the United States and available to help 24-hours a day. Very few companies today provide this kind of dedicated support, and it’s a part of our service commitment that many of our customers appreciate. In fact, our personalized, U.S.-based approach to customer service has recently been featured in several national newspaper stories.

First we had a backlash against having to press 1 for English. Now we seem to have another backlash in the answering service business about making sure a buyer thinks they are calling someone in the U.S. and are calling a number in the U.S.

The company that probably took the most flack for using an Indian call center was Dell Computer, famous for moving almost all of it’s call center function overseas at one point. Even Dell sees this as a mistake and have moved much of their technical support back into the United States.

Too much outsourcing was done too quickly and the answering service market could not keep up. Eventually, people that should not be on the phones were hired out of desperation.

Unfortunately, the damage has been done. Foreign call center backlash is here to stay, and it will take years of excellent customer service to repair the damage that has been done over the past 10 years.

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