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Subject:RE: A data point on offshoring From:MList -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 24 Nov 2003 14:30:10 -0500
Paul Strasser [mailto:paul -dot- strasser -at- windsor-tech -dot- com] said:
> My Dell Customer Service calls last week went to Panama. At
> least, that's
> where the second person said she was. The first call was answered by
> someone with what I thought was more of an Eastern European
> accent.
Back when I worked for Ericsson, in Montreal, the TAC (Technical
Assistance Center, comprising about 100 of the many hundreds of
employees at the Montreal office) was one of five TACs located
around the world, for the purpose of ensuring that customers
would always reach relatively fresh engineers who could stay
with an emergency situation for many hours, and who could also
hand off to more westerly timezones, as the day/night wore on.
Of course, the cheapest systems we sold were cellular system
switches costing in the hundreds of thousands or millions so,
not only could we afford to support a tech-support setup like
that.... we couldn't afford NOT to. When we got a call saying
the customer had a problem and was losing $20,000 USD per minute
in revenue, we didn't have the luxury of putting them off until
"next business day". :-)
Tech-writer tie-in: The on-call engineers had vast amounts
of documentation, both paper and embedded, to refer to,
and they knew what they were looking at. It wasn't a case
of learning about the product as they took the phone-call.
They trained/apprenticed for weeks or months before being
allowed to take the lead on a big call.
/kevin (no longer in the telecomms biz, at least not directly)
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