Re: Bell System Photo by Ansel Adams

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Not only are there no more offices open

> to the public, but many office staffs are being outsourced to India > and/or Hong Kong and the Phillipine Islands. They can hire their help > a lot cheaper in those places. Telco, like many other large corporations > prefers to hide behind the anonymity of the telephone. That topic is > worth a discussion on its own merits I think. PAT]

Believe it or not, as far as the Baby Bells are concerned, almost all of their operators are still in the United States. There are some long distance companies with operators outside the U.S., and some non-U.S. telephone companies are also using "offshore" (outside of their own country) operators, but when it comes to AT&T (the old SBC part of it), BellSouth, Qwest, and Verizon (the non-MCI part of it), if you call directory assistance on your POTS line with 411 or an operator by dialing 0, you're probably speaking to a U.S. citizen.

Why are they still in the U.S. when a lot of other large companies are hiring customer service operators in cheaper countries? Well, you could come up with a number of reasons, but my personal theory is because the Baby Bell operators are so heavily unionized. Unions may not be as powerful as they used to be, but there are a lot of other union workers that the local phone companies have to keep in the U.S. (like plant workers). I don't think the Bells are all that eager to rile up their unions and generate bad publicity at a time when they're trying to convince government entities that mergers and deregulation are good.

Things could always change in the future, but I bet your newswires will light up if any of the former Bells starts wholesale moves of operators offshore.

The broader topic of organizations moving customer service offshore is another matter entirely. Currently, there are enough customers believing Price Is More Important Than Anything Else that it's working out for a lot of companies. Heck, some drive-thru restaurants are even outsourcing their order-taking now to save one minimum wage salary. Drive-thru order-taking is usually simple enough that it works out OK. For more complicated dealings, like telling a company why their product isn't working, I'm finding (in my experience) that it now requires more effort than it used to. This is all still experimental for a lot of companies.

What I'd like to see is an option like, if you pay an extra $5, we'll handle your support calls onshore. I'd like that, just to see how many customers would actually choose it. It'll never happen, though, because a company doing that would be essentially admitting that onshore support is better than offshore support, and right now they're wanting to pretend like there's no difference.

John C. Fowler, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com

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John C. Fowler
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