Thought Garage

The days of ‘Free’ Customer service looks to be over. At least a quality customer service is. This comes to me (and I am sure for most of you) as a big surprise, but I guess we all have to get used to this.

Occasionally, “we’ve heard from customers that it’s hard to understand a particular accent and that they couldn’t understand the instructions they were getting,” said Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman.

So, Dell introduced a Support Service called as ‘Your Tech Team’ Service, that promises that Technical Experts are from North America (instead of Bangalore, India for instance) and average wait time would be less than 2 minutes.

Sounds Great, finally Dell heard the Customers. Not quite. This service is not for every Dell customer that purchases a Dell product, but only for those who pay an additional $12.95 a month to receive this ‘premium’ service.

And Dell Spokesman put a PR spin to this ‘Pay if You need Good Customer Support’ service,

“This illustrates Dell’s commitment to customer choice.” -Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman

In Plain English, Dell is saying ‘Good Customer Support’ is not Free and if you need a Customer Support that you can understand (ie., accent free), you must pay $12.95 a month.

If Dell really understand customers that they have difficultly in understanding instructions by its Global (ie., outsourced) support team, why not replace it with a better customer support that is local, for free.

Source: The Bangalore Backlash: Call Centers Return to U.S

After thinking for a while, I guess, I am already getting used to this new idea. If a company promises a quick (like Dell promising within 2 minutes) response and provide me a customized service for me, I guess I am ready to pay for it. I am not thrilled by a NA associate to responding to my call, as I can understand lots of accentuated instructions, and also I felt some times, that NA associates aren’t any better (they are much worse in many cases). Job hopping is a normality in NA and I don’t expect any better service from an NA associate if they haven’t worked in that particular job for some good time. And on average, most doesn’t spend any good time on any job. So it goes without saying what we can expect of them. And it is equally difficult to find a person to be in NA and doesn’t have an accent anyways.

Quite an interesting aspect of offshore outsourcing, that outsourcing may become just as natural choice as expanding business into emerging markets like China and India.  The article also discusses how traditional cheap sweatshops have become strategic partners leveraging the models that they invented for themselves.

Two-thirds of companies on the InformationWeek 500 list of business technology innovators say they do offshore IT outsourcing, up from 43% in 2004. Consulting firm NeoIT estimates that 75% of the world’s 2,000 largest companies are engaged in offshore outsourcing, with 20% of their IT budgets spent on offshore contracts; it predicts that could rise to as much as 40% of budgets in the coming years.

Cost cutting is usually the main driver, but as companies rely ever more on foreign markets for revenue growth, they’re rethinking where they want their employees, including those in IT. For Genworth’s McKay, it makes sense that globalization of the IT workforce follows globalization of the business: About 30% of the company’s revenue now comes from outside the United States, and that’s projected to grow to 50% by 2010. About one-fourth of InformationWeek 500 companies say they’re expanding their IT operations in China, India, or another part of Asia.

The Second Decade Of Offshore Outsourcing: Where We’re Headed — IT Offshore Outsourcing

TCS released results of a survey conducted by Dynamic Markets on behalf of TCS recently. Folks from TCS suddenly think that they uncovered something new. I am not sure I understood the revelation part of their press release.

1 in 3 companies’ IT projects fail to perform against expectations. Yet despite these worrying levels of failure to deliver, 43% of organizations say that their business managers and the Board accept problems as the norm. This attitude is especially common in Europe (44%) and Asia-Pac (48%). (Source)

Consider the snip, I understand, released in 1995 revealing something about IT Project failures.

According to the Standish Group … … only about one-sixth of all projects were completed on time and within budget, nearly one third of all projects were canceled outright, and well over half were considered "challenged." Of the challenged or canceled projects, the average project was 189 percent over budget, 222 percent behind schedule, and contained only 61 percent of the originally specified features.

Major Causes of Software Project Failures – Jul 98

How TCS Stacks up?

Delivered on time:
Industry survey: 37%; TCS: 97%, customers give it an 87% rating.

Quality meets expectations:
Industry survey: 42%; TCS: 97% without severity level 1 or 2 defects, customers give it an 86% rating.

Budget compliance:
Industry survey: 11% average variation; TCS: 0.05% average variation (Source)

Not surprisingly, TCS claims that it performs monumentally better than its counter parts. It would be interesting if TCS release more information on IT firms that these businesses have been dealing with and some numbers for other top 10 firms as well to validate the unique distinction of TCS. Without those numbers, % comparisons could be totally misleading.

Some thing incredible about Japan

Japan stands out in many aspects for its quality. Does ‘Made in Japan’ say something? As per the report 71% of Japanese IT managers say that their Business Managers and Board of Directors tend to accept the problem as a norm and necessary evil. What? And 81% say that their IT Projects are continued to be funded.

This is quite incredible. Having worked with one of the top 3 out sourcing IT companies for about 7 years, I guess there is something fishy about this report. I never heard of a Japanese client manager considering not-on-time delivery or budget over run a norm and necessary evil. Ask any body that is working or worked on a IT project for Japanese client. Our teams have been literally killed even for a delay of one day.

97% on-time-delivery record of TCS, too good to be true. Hope it is true.