Outsourcing sounds great. It could be great. However, you have to compare Apples to Apples.
I stumbled on post from an Aussie who had some negative experiences with offshore outsourcing and his analysis of the situation. His analysis married well to my intuition based on experiences in corporate America. The outsource workers are often cheaper on paper, but total cost to the desired output was higher than using onshore labor.
Check out his full post.
The trickiest part is that the onshore labor quality varies WIDELY as well. It may be that offshore beats out bad onshore, but loses to good onshore. "Bad" and "Good" are up to the employer and therein lies all the problems in the world.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Outsourcing Mistakes
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2 comments:
Most of us have had the experience of being on an outsourced phone call either for help of some kind, like Dell or to make a hotel reservation.
The time that it takes alone must add cost to the service
It's funny that you mention outsourcing and Dell -- I worked for a rebate-processing company that tried for two years to get Dell's rebate business. Their main hesitation in signing with us was that all our call centers were offshore (read: English as a second language) in the DR. At the time, they had been marketing that their call-center experience was less difficult than the competition because they implied that callers would get a CSR who spoke English as a first language.
Finally after two years of back-and-forth, we established a Call Center in New Brunswick, Canada (the Looney being cheaper than the USD at the time). We ramped up for the new business and then three or four months later Dell dropped us to go with a competitor!
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