Outsourcing Call Centers: Customer Service Heads Back to British Shores

Despite that an excessively excellent image of outsourcing was provided to individuals one or two of years back, the truth check they were confronted with shattered the dream badly. Recent statistics reveal that over four-hundredth corporations are concerned either in experimenting or are already engaged in shifting their services overseas in search of low-cost labor and services that are being provided by countries like China and Bharat. Such efforts have left native market labor at extreme disadvantage wherever they're finding it vastly tedious to create each ends meet, leave behind the back-breaking burden of taxes they're being obligatory to. With over four-hundredth major company executives registering their opinion by discouraging the method of outsourcing the controversy that was antecedently being won by the

While outsourcing may be beneficial to some of the companies partaking in it, the general consensus is that it ultimately proves to be harmful to the American workforce. The act of outsourcing and shifting many company call centers and technical support teams, or “low skill service jobs,” to foreign countries reduces jobs for those that could truly benefit from them within our own country. The unemployment rate has dramatically increased, and continues to rise, compared to what it has been in years past; yet there are numerous companies which still insist on handing over these “low skill service jobs” to people in other countries such as India. The most obvious and logical reason for outsourcing is reducing costs; people are working for

Specifically, companies are transferring these services overseas as in the case of call and help center services or companies are ordering manufacturing supplies from overseas at a much cheaper price than they could obtain them inside the U.S. Outsourcing is a term that is often used interchangeably with off shoring (Bhagwati, Panagariya, & Srinivasan, 2004).

Two different customer service models that most retail and online retail organisations use are the cheap prices and convenience model and the personalized in-depth model. The cheap price model is controlled by management and ensures policies and procedures are in place that can be easily measured and constantly measured. This is the one that we at Flanagan’s use more than the other model. However, the other models the personalized and in depth model is used predominately by our other section of the organisation. This is the hotel and leisure and building maintenance side of the business. This is face to face and allows our agents/advisors to be more personal with them. Good use of

Proponents for offshoring say that it is good for the economy. According to Alan Blinder, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, as of 2004, jobs that can be offshored have seen a decrease of 13% in what employees here at home are paid to do that job. This result surprised him and other economic professionals. Blinder believes that offshoring will hurt the United States in other ways as well as lower wage levels, including higher unemployment rates and depreciated dollar levels (“Offshoring: Will Last 2-3 Decades, 30-40 Million American Jobs Lost.” 2009). It cannot possibly be good for the American economy to lose numerous jobs to overseas workers as well as seeing the value of our dollar going down along with wages.

The outsourcing of non-core business and services has risen in recent years. The top benefactor of this rise has been India. Corporations have found a profusion of well-trained, English-speaking workers to cram into call centers and customer service jobs. This is even happening in high-skill positions like hospital X-rays technicians also. India is seen as the pioneer in outsourcing jobs

Over the past decade, many companies from North America have moved to foreign countries. This migration is known by many names – “runaway plants”, “outsourcing”, “global sourcing” and “offshoring” ("Outsourcing: What's the true impact? Counting jobs is only part of the answer."). According to Investopedia, outsourcing is “a practice used by different companies to reduce costs by transferring portions of work to outside suppliers rather than completing it internally” ("Outsourcing Definition | Investopedia"). Companies outsource primarily to cut cost. This mostly helps them to reduce their cost by 60 percent since labour in many Asian countries like China and India is very cheap. Even though offshoring is benefiting companies, it has negative

In an increasingly globalize society, it is nothing new to hear about product development and assembly going abroad. Factory jobs have been moved to other nations for decades, and more recently, customer call centers are being relocated to foreign nations. With the current downturn in the economy, people are looking to at this situation in an increasingly negative way. Not all work that moved abroad ended in satisfaction, yet the trend appears to be spreading to new jobs and industries. With the growing population of college educated in foreign nations, software development jobs are shipping overseas. With many incentives associated with outsourcing to various countries versus keeping jobs in the country,

The only way to get new customers is to expand the business further out in the world. Outsourcing to India would allow a new group of customers and different kind of ethics. A positive to outsourcing to India would be that India has not yet seen this type of business before and could be in high demand (Rampton,

Call centres are integral part of any particular organization in today’s modern world as they play a crucial role in the business world and act as the primary source of contact with the customers (Abbott, 2010). The performance call centres play in organizations are increasingly importance in ensuring that the organization offers excellent services to end-users and their customers (Bruton, 2012). As the business environment changes every day, customers are becoming more demanding and sophisticated with their needs, desires, and the quality of their products and services. Thus, every organisation should aim to keep resources (both human and technical) as high as possible while maintaining the quality of services to the customers and ensuring employee satisfaction.

Company needed to move from a Task focused to a Customer Service focused organisation and prepare for substantial future growth

Home and corporate users dominate the five categories of buyers on PC consumption. There are large amounts of these buyers in the market that are price sensitive and have low switching costs on their products which raises overall buyers’ power. However, in the case of Dell, many customers became frustrated with Dell. For example, Dell’s call centers received manyf discouraged clients’ comments. One reason: many service representatives were trained to solve only one category of a problem, so almost 45% of calls had to be transferred from the agent who answered the call to someone with the knowledge needed to help the customer. Richard L. Hunter, who was brought in to improve Dell’s customer service, called the situation “terrible”, explaining that it was comparable to “delivering materials to the wrong factory 45 percent of the time.” Worse, to slow the tide of calls from customers, Dell tried removing its toll-free service number from its website. Customers’ reactions showed up in Dell’s declining market share and slumping customer satisfaction ratings (Certo, 2013). Moreover, when Dell went on to expand its tech support outsourcing with other call centres in India, customers began complaining. Consequently, Dell stopped being perceived as an American role

In the area of call centres end user experience is deemed to be of lower quality when a service is outsourced. This is exacerbated when outsourcing is combined with offshoring to regions where the first language and culture are different.

The case describes the activities of a hypothetical roadside assistance organisation that is considering the relocation of its call centre from an existing base in the West Midlands of England to a location in Mumbai in western India.

Offshoring is the practice of relocating business processes to lower cost locations outside the country of origin. This is not a new practice for companies in the United States. Moving business processes to another country to take advantages of lower operating costs and cheap labor seems like a great idea. However, the dilemma for a company is whether the benefits of offshoring outweigh the risks. This dissertation will begin by briefly reviewing the history of offshoring. Next, it will examine the various advantages and disadvantages associated with offshoring. Thirdly, it will explore the growing trends of backshoring and nearshoring in situations where