[Discuss] WRT Dell trashing their own reputation by offshoring support to India [Was: Justify your existence]

[Dave Gavin]

 My experience with the DELL off-shore support was that they seemed to
have a script and could not diverge from it. The folks I talked to always
seemed to be non-technical and refused to escalate until we got through
their entire script. I eventually adopted the tactic of agreeing and
"Yup, did that - didn't work" as someone else suggested to get to someone
who could hopefully help. I quickly gave up on DELL support and have
found online forums and mailing lists (particularly this one) MUCH more
helpful in solving problems.
  I was shocked when calling one of our service providers about an outage
when I got a very knowledgeable person who spoke quite clearly - it
turned out that he was in Nova Scotia !

 Dave

-- 
"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."
- Sigmund Freud (speaking about the Irish)

On Sat, December 17, 2011 2:18 pm, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 12/17/2011 11:55 AM, MBR wrote:
>> After Dell fired their U.S. support people and outsourced the function
>> to India, I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation
>> with their support people.  During my calls to them over the first few
>> years after they did that, I naively assumed the support people were
>> technically knowledgeable, and I continued trying to engage them in
>> technical conversation to solve my problem, but that was always
>> impossible.
> My experience with Dell was very spotty since I have no Dell stuff, and
> it was only for a friend or client.
> "I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with their
> support people"
> This is the key. You want to be able to have an intelligent conversation
> with a support person and to be able to understand. I had a few times to
> contact Compaq support (before HP). I found back then that the Indians
> were much more technically competent that the non-Indians. On a single
> issue, I had a couple of US people who gave me the wrong answers, where
> when I spoke to an Indian, he gave me exactly what fixed the problem.
>
> First, many people have trouble with some foreign accents, and I believe
> that this was one of the major Dell user complaints. Whoever you speak
> to should be reasonably articulate and easily understandable.
> Second, the person should be knowledgeable enough to either identify and
> solve your problem or escalate it to someone who does.
>
> My recent conversation with the RCN customer service person was that he
> told me:
> 1. While I paid for a "static IP", since you had only a single static IP
> it was only a sticky and he refused to budge.
> 2. We were paying for an 8-IP subnet not a single static.
> The issue comes under that category of intelligent conversation. I had
> the bill in my hand. What they failed to do was to move the subnet over
> from the 20/2 DOCSIS 1 modem to the DOCSIS 3 modem as was required by
> the contract. My problem is I had a SonicWall that could only be
> programmed by our IT department. The only thing I could have done was to
> do a factory reset, get it on some working network, and then let IT
> reprogram it.  I told him that, but I didn't tell him that I had 2 other
> networks in the same computer room. In any case they finally fixed the
> problem after I yelled and screamed.
>
> The bottom line is it does not matter where the support people are. It
> is a matter of training.
>
> --
> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix
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>
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