Outsourced Customer Service

A Letter from The Cube to Management

If you think you are providing customer service by outsourcing to India, you are mistaken.

It is not their fault, over there in India: they cannot think like we do, they cannot understand the nuances of our culture. Just like we have the same handicap in the other direction. Sure, there will be a few of us on either side who can learn and catch the nuances – but it’s difficult. All you have to do is look at how many 1st generation immigrants stay locked in the mindset of the “old country” and you will understand how intrinsically unfair and impossible it is to ask thousands of clericals in India to understand us over here when they answer the phone or instant-message technical help online.

They are patient, God bless ’em, they – are – patient. And polite. We are in the tag end of a five (yes, five!) hour online tech services exploration and I gave up before the anonymous Christina, David and, now, an unnamed supervisor could guide me to a resolution that solved the problem. I found it, finally, by figuring out where they were unable to understand the basic problem and worked backwards from their over-complications.

“Understand.” Words are only a part of understanding. Then there is the between-the-lines level of syntax, logic and shared cultural experience that is the intuitive part of language. Politeness and patience are not resolution, they are methods for coping. Technical vocabulary is not equivalent to comprehension.

To put it in perspective: Years ago, when working with expatriates in the Middle East before the region turned violent, we found it necessary to convey technical information in drawings and photographs to our multicultural crew – all of whom spoke English. Body language became as important a part of communication as words. And we needed time - a short commodity in the customer service field. Time learn the cultural givens and assumptions that informed each person’s understanding of the English words we were speaking. Sometimes a few minutes. Sometimes a few hours. Sometimes. . . . it didn’t happen. To quote Kipling, whose “white man’s burden” assumed racism sometimes overshadows the logic of his experienced reasoning:
East is East and West is West
And never the twain shall meet.

Well, not entirely true. A couple of years ago, Sanjay in Tonawanda, New York, was my supposedly “anonymous” tech support guy on a recurring ISP/cable delivery problem. Oh, Sanjay was Indian all right – but he was also from New York – and within five minutes he cut through the bull to give me some advice that has literally saved me hours of downtime since then. (“Customer service will always tell you that the lines are being ‘temporarily repaired’. They don’t even have Status screens. Skip them & go straight to us.”)

But Sanjay was corrupted: he was American. Y’see, those of you who are outsourcing your Customer Service and Technical Support voices to India, it takes an American to understand an American’s needs. It takes an Indian to understand Indian needs. A Japanese. . . .

I wrote the majority of this while waiting for Christina and David to consult their supervisor on why a simple popup screen in my program did not respond with the same message that their version of the software did, thus blocking further progress. They did not understand that the message appearing was the equivalent of the message they wanted – which had been my elementary question in the first place – but by the time they were finished analyzing, offering solutions and guiding me through aborted re-programming routines, they had re-invented the wheel. I would like to say that this is the first time this has happened and that I am the only person it has happened to.

Yes, I am sure that Christina and David are cheaper to employ than their American counterparts Sanjay and Shagufta – but they aren’t providing customer service. They can’t.