This article is totally right. More and more companies need to know that outsourcing call center support to non-english speaking (for english speaking customers, at least), non-technically inclined people is NEVER a good idea. I have had a few expiriences with poor customer support. Once from India, and one from here in the good ol USA.

I used to manage a few routers for a pretty good sized company. One of our sites had 4 leased T-1s from a Worldcom subsidiary, and their support line went to india. These were not the only circuits on my router, and were not the way I connected to it. Needless to say, they went down alot. Everytime, I would call them and tell them that the circuit was down. They would ask me how I knew, and I would tell them my interface was showing down on my router, and I could not ping their side of the circuit. They would either reply that the "circuit is not down on our side," ask how I was able to connect to the router if the circuit was down, or they would ask me to reboot the router (reboot a router???).... yeah.... not going to happen. I would offer to bounce the interface and got confused replies. I always had to fight with them to convince them of the problem, and I think it was because they had limited montoring capability and skill. It was always a fight getting through their tier1 people to someone that could actually help me, and the language barrier did not help. The knowledge level varied from person to person, but I think most of their skill came from a flipchart and an HP openview-like system.

The second expirience I will relate is one dealing with qwest. Another one of my routers had a circuit from them and just getting the thing set up was a month long, uphill battle. We were dealing with their "Sr IP Engineer" (whatever that is) and he did not understand IP, subnetting, routing, advertising, and least of all BGP. He couldn't even create a static route, and he was located somewhere in the US. His english was good, he was just a moron.

So, I guess the main point of my post is that if these companies are going to outsource, they should at least find people that know what they are doing and speak enough english to convey that.

There are other companies that have poor tech support. AOL, for instance. I have spoken to people that worked at AOL, and (at least in the past) their goal is to get the AOL client working. If it breaks anything else (and it will), they won't help you out with it. They also use the infamous flipcharts, if it isn't on the flipchart, they don't have an answer for you.

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