Stop this outsourcing crap (repost)

The phone rings and I pick it up to hear a voice with a heavy Indian accent. “Hello is that Nigel Thompson?” I tell him is, and ask what his name is. He tells me it’s John Nash. Right, I ask him if he’s in Bangalore or Hyderabad. He says that it is company policy not to disclose that information. I’m sure it is. The company in question is AT&T, our former long distance carrier. They are calling to find out why we haven’t paid the bill for calls we made after we closed our account with them. That’s not their version of it, of course but that’s the deal. We switched long distance carriers and AT&T continued to bill us. Now I really don’t want to get into who owns the fibre that carries the calls that my local phone company uses because at the end of the day they belong to MCI or some other large company and all these phone companies just send your call over whatever lines they have arrangements to use. This is just how it works. The real pain in this case is that the person calling to attempt to get me to pay for services not rendered is not willing to send me an itemized list of the things they are claiming I need to pay for. We have tried customer service and countless other people at AT&T but none of them is willing to send us a record of the calls we made. So it comes down to this: AT&T puts a guy on the phone from its collections department who doesn’t speak English very well, isn’t able or just won’t to send me a copy of the records he tells me he can see on his screen. He doesn’t care that we closed the account – he can see that on his screen along with the bogus billing records. He’s not talking to me as an AT&T customer (which I’m not at this point). He’s just doing some mindless job for twenty rupees a week by reading a script over the phone. Please tell me how this is helping AT&T make money? If you’re an AT&T shareholder, here’s some news: the company you’ve bought into is run by morons who think that employing non-native English speakers with fake American-sounding names is helping business because it’s cheaper than employing someone in the U.S. To digress for a moment, is letting an employee represent himself by a fake name fraud? Perhaps he’s not even with AT&T? After a long time on the phone with this guy I decided two things: My time was being wasted by someone who could care less about me, and I had now cost AT&T a fair amount of money in talking to me. I don’t suppose I cost them as much as the amount they were trying to stiff me for but I had hopes that it was close. Here’s another business tip for the idiots running AT&T: If the customer has closed the account and only owes (say) less than $100, don’t bother trying to collect – it will cost more to collect than it’s worth. Write it off and move on. Of course the modern computer-based company can’t make a decision like that. If I owed AT&T just one cent, I’m sure the process would schedule the call anyway. This is how business is done now. Some program implements a policy and spits out instructions to a building full of low-cost employees in Bangalore who use AT&Ts long-distance lines to phone you and ask you to pay the bill. After putting down the phone I decided that dealing with these morons wasn’t worth it. The amount of money was very small and I consider my time away from work valuable (this was on a Saturday) so I decided to pay the bill and ignore the fact that I really didn’t think we owed them the money. I call the number and get another India voice. This one is far more polite (must be earlier in his shift). When I made the call, the automated robot asked me for my phone number before it connected me. They don’t have caller ID at AT&T? I type it in one the phone. So what’s the first question the guy asks when I’m connected? “What is your phone number?” Really these guys must have worked for the CIA in a previous life. They have NO IDEA how to keep track of any information at all. There is a pause and he says: “You are not an AT&T customer”. Right. That was the point I was trying to make about two months ago when we closed the account. No matter, I am un-phased by this attempt to side-track me from getting the AT&T monkey off my back. I ask him to check our records, confirm the account number and verify the amount outstanding. The computing gods are with us. He even has a record of the so-called John Nash conversation. I pay the bill by credit card, get a confirmation number and we’re done. But no, not quite. I am dumbstruck as he asks me: “How much are you paying for your long distance service?”. I tell him that’s none of his business. I visualize the guy reading from his script: “AT&T has several long-distance packages ...” I cut him off. I don’t want another AT&T account. AT&T has one long-distance package I never want again – their Indian-based customer service.
This problem is not unique to AT&T. There are a lot of other U.S. companies who outsource their technical support, customer service and so on. If you are a customer of one of these companies and you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to call them, ask them where they are. These companies don’t want to admit to you that they took jobs from the U.S. and outsourced them. They allow their employees to provide fake names. Some even have training so they can learn a few American expressions to use casually in the conversation. [Please imagine strong Indian accent] “Howdy, very pleased am I to be having speaks with y’all today. My name is Buck Rogers. How may I be helping you please?” Some of them are in Costa Rica of course, not India but I can’t do the accent.
On a final note, let me say that I have absolutely nothing against Indian people. I have some friends who are Indian and work with some of them too. My issue is with the American companies who are exploiting these people because they cost less to employ than a body here in the U.S. Yes, this is exploitation. The goal is to push up the stock price. If they can’t do it by selling more good, they try to do it in the short term by lowering costs. Nowhere in that equation is the effect on customer satisfaction. So long as we all keep putting up with this crappy service, they’ll keep taking our money.