Outsourcing: Customer relations is the killer

IN THE SHORTER term, the second of the problems, customer relations, is the killer. When you buy a product, do you compare each and every product in the field, or do you just pick the brand you know? Do you buy Coke or generic cola, even if the store brand is only half the cost? Nike or Wal-Mart sneakers? Asus or generic motherboard #12? Why? Probably two reasons, you know what you are getting and if there is a problem, it stands a good chance of having a satisfactory solution.

A can of Coke probably won't need warranty service in three months, but if you open it, and it tastes in the slightest way off, there is a well-staffed phone bank that will make it right. IBM will make it right. In my last few calls to them HP wouldn't, and neither would Dell.

When HP went on its self-destructive outsourcing rampage last year, I got a lot of letters from the people who were let go. Some of them, especially the ones in Canada, told me a story that exemplifies the problem. They were all paid in the $10-15 an hour range while working for HP. Then they got fired, or some other word that portends humanity, but lacks it in meaning. They were immediately offered the same job at the outsourcing company located in the same town. The "new" jobs paid in the $5-10 an hour range. Worse yet, working conditions were much worse at the new place.

The worst part was the contract was bid on cost and, while I have not seen it myself, I would suspect, numeric targets. Things like problems resolved in X number of minutes after no longer than Y minutes on hold. No more than Z percent of callers will have to call second time. The usual.

People on the inside were told not to take time to fix the problems if it took more than a few minutes. Don't help the customer do anything more than the bare minimum. Training? Again, bare minimum. It was all about hitting the numbers, not about fixing things. When you bid for outsourcing contracts, you don't bid for quality of service, you bid for the lowest cost that will meet the bare minimum of service you reasonably expect people will tolerate. Bad bad bad move.

If you haven't guessed, this is not the best way to win the hearts and minds of the consumer base, and it gets worse. The people who answer the calls are graded on how long they take to resolve a problem. If your job depends on averaging 10 calls an hour, eight hours a day, and someone calls in with a problem that you know will take 45 minutes to resolve, what do you do, fix the problem, or tell them to do something that will get them off the phone in five minutes?

Imagine you are a call centre operator and you have some poor sod who has the misfortune of installing McAfee 6.0x, and when they try to install a SuperDat upgrade, it blows up on them. The control panel no longer works, the uninstall no longer works, and you can't reinstall because it tells you to uninstall the old one first.

The right answer to fix this is to open regedit, and delete all Network Associates and McAfee related keys, one by one. Then delete the program folders, installers, and associated detritus. There are a lot of keys, I have done this several times, and it does not get any more fun each time I do it. After a half dozen times, I could do it in 30 minutes, 45 if the machine was less than cutting edge.

So, you are the hapless call center worker, and someone calls you saying McAfee is hosed. You know exactly what the problem is as soon as you hear the first symptom, even before the dog slow terminal walks you to the correct part of the flowchart. You can fix this one in your sleep. Now comes the moral dilemma, do you fix it right the first time, telling the person that it will take at least an hour, or do you tell them to pull out the install disks, format the drive and reinstall Windows because there is no hope for them?

If you actually care about the customer, and have pride in getting things fixed because your company does no less for its customers, you take the hour or more. If you are reprimanded for not hitting your numbers, and stand a good chance of being fired because the tracking system doesn't care about how the customers are overjoyed with their support, you tell them to format, and are off the phone in two minutes flat. µ

Part Three: Tomorrow