Lately I've been on the phone a lot, trying to straighten out the side effects of my social-security problem or dealing with tech-support issues with my gadgets. And in the process, I've discovered something very impressive: the quantum leaps in service from tech-support people who work the phones in India.
Remember when big companies first started outsourcing their service calls to India? A lot of people -- including me -- groaned and complained that the new workers didn't seem to know as much as their counterparts in the West, that they had limited scripts and tasks they could perform, that there were language barriers and difficult accents, and that their function often seemed to be as a "bouncer" who kept us from making contact with the people who actually knew how to solve our problems. Not anymore.
Most of the tech-support people I've talked to lately have been somewhere India, and the service has been great. They've been patient, attentive, friendly, professional, great on follow-through, and always resolved my troubles with little effort on my part. And I realized this has been going on for awhile: phone support has gotten good again -- if you get someone in India, that is.
It's not just because I read the Chetan Bhagat novel, "One Night at the Call Center," though I did feel empathy for the characters and the abusive treatment they sometimes got from their American callers. But I've realized that every time I make a support call and a person in India answers the phone, I get my problem solved pretty quickly....and when I make a phone call to a company in the USA and get a robot that makes a fake typing sound in the background, I DON'T get my problem solved.
So...here's a high-five to the tech-support workers in India... I hope that your employers start letting you use your real names instead of anglicized ones, because it's time for my culture to start recognizing where a lot of our tech talent is actually coming from.
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