The part of the article I liked was
America Online offers proof of how quickly offshore service operations can be built. The giant U.S. on-line-service provider set up just 20 workstations last year in the Clark special economic zone at the former U.S. air base about 80 kilometres northwest of Manila. Now it has 600 Filipino customer-service employees
Why pay a middle man in the form of ZSUN, when you can just do it yourself for less and have better control? I used to think the service live unit was one of the few area that held promise for ZSUN, but now I think so less and less.
Problems. Cost, and security.
Customer service to a dotcom is crucial. Most companies are not going to want to farm it out. Besides you would have to be fairly large in size before it would become economically feasible to do so. If your that large then you'll still think twice about farming it out overseas, and think yet again about farming it out to some two bit outfit like ZSUN. More likely you'd just do it yourself, or go with a more established outfit.
Other problems, if it's an etail dotcom, many of your problems will be about the transaction process itself. In todays security conscious world you don't want outside companies having access to clients credit cards, or even addresses. It's one thing if ZSUN was a credit card processing center, but they're not. What if someone orders from widgets.com, the shopping cart hiccups and they have a problem. Maybe an online newbie emails the customer help with there credit card info.
Or what if a company employee is having trouble sending an attachment that has some top secret info in it, and he sends it to his companies service center asking for help. Only the company service center isn't inhouse, it's halfway around the world. Oops.
Lots of security and cost effectiveness issues involved.
There might be a few niche companies that could use the service but not too many.
Perhaps ZSUN would like to put out a PR talking about the clients it has using the service(after all, surely they've signed up someone in the past year) rather than PR's that try to mention AOL as often as possible.
CMB |
