I have heard so much about quality issues in offshoring to India. Is this leading companies to seak out near-shore solutions? Has there been a wave of Call Centre work moving back home (to the UK, US and/or Canada)?

Daniel,

I don't think there is a wave moving and too a large degree it is an exercise in 'caveat emptor' and all of these markets. Client organizations are seeking the best quality at the best price. Depending upon the application and the companies involved they can find this in the US, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, India or the Phillipines.
Some applications will simply be done where the cost is lowest, though these same applications have the highest risk of automation. These low complexity, repeditive tasks will tend to move and happily operate off-shore. More complex applications may well work domestically, near shore and/or offshore depending upon the quality/price value proposition...Let me illustrate for $1.00 per minute in the US, you can get the same level of training/educational staff quality service in Canada for $.75, and in Ireland for $.65 and in India for $.55. So from an economic perspective all call centers would move to India, however in terms of rating 'cultural context' for say the US you will find this rating at 100, in Canada 95 Ireland 80 and the India 40. So where is the right balance? It depends upon the relative importance of price, cultural context who your customers are and what they expect.

There are poor quality operations in every country in the world and what in many cases 'poor quality' has really been a 'poor fit' (price vs context and customer expectations). Exppect the pendulum to continue to swing back and forth a few more times.

I hope that I have added some value to this discussion. if I can be of further assistance please contact me directly at ctaylor@thetaylorreachgroup.com

Colin

When asking about failures of programs in India, InternationalStaff.net has found that reasons differ according to the type of program. At the high end, failures are largely due to Western clients’ management issues and lack of planning, not issues with Indian agents.

See this article for more information on outsourcing failures:

http://crmbuyer.com/story/35308.html

Gulf, Lankan, and Pakistani centres are following a different pattern at the moment, but this will change as their IT outsourcing industries mature.

Lankans are out to sea right now and need the most hand-holding.

Pakistani centres are more likely to face technical problems than Gulf or Indian ones, especially given the high utilization rate of VoIP, and with way too many backbone hops. VoIP has not been shown to scale well in Pakistan.

Anthony Mitchell, CEO
InternationalStaff.net

Hi All,

There was an interesting article recently about Dell's decision to move its corporate support back to the US. The article discussed the implications of moving back and the message that it gave to Dell's customers. By moving the corporate support back home Dell were esentially saying that the quality of support was higher in the US . . . and therefore the support that they were giving to domestic customers was inferior. Interesting that they can make such a bold move and get away with it. Any thoughts?

Jim.