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To: Live2Sail who wrote (44908)	11/20/2005 5:25:29 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

yes that is correct. I am very close to this issue of offshoring. 02 was the peak for offshoring in terms of the "wham bam" approach. The results were less than stellar for most. This is for call center, software development, everything. Like all business trends the benefits of doing this were way oversold. First of all the direct savings were not as high as expected, but there were other "hidden costs" (personally I think Dell is going to suffer for years for their decision to move PC support to india. They have reigned it in now, but it is too late, the damage to their rep is done). Anyway the reason it took so long for jobs to recover in SV after this recession was only partly due to the severity of the recession. A significant problem was that Gartner had every engineering and IT dept offshoring everything but the kitchen sink. After a year or two with the results, staff was rehired in the US, and now we have a boomlet in SV again. Duh. Long term, there will always be offshoring of some tasks for US businesses but it will be gradual and not many will notice- thats fine, that is what the US economy has been engaged in forever.

To: Live2Sail who wrote (44908)	11/21/2005 12:49:53 AM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

The truth is that Indians have been using telephone in their daily life only for five years. In the whole of 20th century India added about 40 million phone lines (these were mainly in business use). In the last 5 years have they added another 75 million. What any kid in USA learns about customer service and telephone manners just by existing, those skills have to be taught to young employees. Good English speakers typically come from well off families and do not like to work in support jobs. In spite of that handicap, Indian centers have become fairly good at delivering Level 1 service. Every month, the style and call control exhibited by the agents seems to be improving, and they have pretty much caught up in phone manners and are more easily understandable. The offshore centers in the phone support market face many problems. The true techies don't want to work in shifts, especially night shifts. True techies are too proud to try to change their accents and styles of speaking for the US audience, and are soon bored of the low tech scripted work. They take up some of phone support jobs until a software development offer comes along. The low-techies who staff the support desks change jobs too often, have trouble going beyond level 1 technical support, and have been on their latest jobs for too short a period to acquire any deep expertise. Some of them become as good as US support, but there are many others who generate complaints. Therefore, the numbers who could possibly support enterprise customers is currently small. However, many more will get to that level in a year or two. It takes about 2-3 years of job experience to become good. Most support people have less experience than that. >I'm hearing that enterprise customers do not like their support in India. It seems that the offshore phone support know little more than their script. Don't know why that would be limited to offshore phone support, but people seem to complain about that the most.>