Outsourced

Sometime over the weekend, The Bank’s contracted supplier of hardware support outsourced their call center to somewhere in India. What that means is, aside from the language barriers, the time it takes to place a hardware call jumped from 3 minutes or so to over 20 minutes. Sometimes as long as an hour.

This is not a difficult job. The Help Desk calls the call center, provides customer name, address, phone number, model type, serial number, issue description and tracking number. The Call Center enters this information into a database and provides another tracking number in return. I could take nearly any person off the street here and have them doing this job in an hour. It’s trained chimpanzee stuff. I don’t know who they hired in India, but the people they got aren’t capable of doing the job.

For high severity issues, the hardware supplier is contractually obligated to respond to the user within one hour. If it takes nearly that long to get through to the call center and place the call, they are going to be constantly in violation of the contract. It won’t be long before The Bank begins reconsidering their contract.

It doesn’t mean much to me personally. I don’t call in hardware issues. But when users begin calling back to complain that their level of service has dropped, the Help Desk bears the brunt of their ire. I’ll simply blame the hardware supplier.

In a more philosophical sense, I both cheer and loathe this decision. I hate the idea that my job could be outsourced to India. But in the nightmare of outsourcing this extremely simple call center task, the likelihood of my more technically intensive job going overseas has plummeted.