rare pattern thoughts in a blog

I read with relief that Apple has bailed on plans to go with tech support based in India. As Jobs explains:

In late May, Apple dismissed most of the 30 new hires at its subsidiary in Bangalore. (A handful working in sales and marketing will stay on.) Spokesman Steve Dowling would say only that Apple had "reevaluated our plans" and decided to provide support from other countries. Another source familiar with the situation, though, says the decision was cost-driven. "India isn't as inexpensive as it used to be," the source says. "The turnover is high, and the competition for good people is strong." Apple feels it "can do [such work] more efficiently elsewhere."

Here is where I should confess that my relief, as a Mac owner and, since 2002, semi-evangelist, comes not from Jobs' business rationale but from my own rather underwhelming experiences with India-based support.

Whether it's been Travelocity or United or Linksys or Dell or a number of other conglomerates, I've been left feeling consistently dissatisfied, disrespected, dismissed, denigrated and generally unappreciated by their "foreign" liaisons. (Travelocity and United couldn't care less about my itinerary glitch, Dell gave me the runaround more times than I care to admit [and at the end I had to pay for the privilege] and a Linksys rep actually attempted to blame a failing Linksys router on the fact that I was using a Mac. [I ended up futzing through and finding my own solution: manually re-setting the router's IP range].

I know I'm treading on some liberal taboos here. A reactionary reading of this post might place me square in the realm of being racist -- which is anything but descriptive. Perhaps that's why nobody every says the emperor has no clothes when it comes to foreign-based customer service.

Despite what people might assume, I don't consider it a race issue -- I consider it a cultural issue -- a corporate culture issue.

Here's the question: Do Indian support firms have any actual authority to provide meaningful customer service? More significantly, do any customer service departments for major corporations have any meaningful capability to really take care of their customers?

Last year, when I had some fairly persistent problems with my old 17" iMac, which went through no fewer than six midplane assemblies in one year, an understanding US-based customer service rep actually gave me a free upgrade of my Final Cut Pro suite to the then-current FCP 4.5 HD version. That counted for a lot, because I was incredibly frustrated with the (let's face it) crappy hardware components Apple was using in some of its machines, and their little concession to me bought a lot of goodwill on my part. At least they cared about me as a customer. And what did it cost them, in the end, to give away this upgrade? (In fact, I just upgraded again to FCP Studio, so they kept me on the paying upgrade path.)

I have to wonder: Would a wage earner in Bangalore have any authority to do this?

Certainly other tech support challenges can arise over the phone, such as ability to speak clear English -- but that's something that can happen within the US, even with native speakers -- and, for the most part, I've not run into that particular problem all that often.

But I do feel like I am attempting to speak across the divide. When corporations outsource their customer service to foreign lands, there's an implicit statement there that they really just don't want to deal with you. "Talk to the hand," they are in effect saying by sending customers to sub-contracted companies that can only say "no," and never "yes."

In other words, the attitude ingrained in corporate culture that the customer is a problem to be contained and managed -- this is the real problem.

Is there more to it? Police departments learned that you can't ignore culture when it comes to community relations -- and thus effectiveness within communities -- and have, over the past decade or two, instituted more community-based patrols and recruited from the communities they "serve and protect." Could it be time that corporations all over the world realize that the best customer service comes from the customer's own culture?

I don't know. But first they have to realize that customers are not problems but resources -- for money, for product/service feedback, for insight into new opportunities. Does anyone really know of any Fortune 500 companies that do that? Lately it seems "they" are more interested in service of process rather than service of the customer.

About the author

Laura Scott is a web designer and developer.