I frequently work with folks from India when I'm seeking warranty support on various products. These folks can often understand quickly spoken English (I'm a fast talker), and sometimes even speak English well enough to be understood by me. The large majority of the time, however, the Indian tech support personnel are all but incomprehensible. This has become a large problem. I have on a few occasions been obligated to spend up to 3 hours on the phone to get warranty for a defective hardware product. And failed because a) they are providing a scripted response and don’t really comprehend the problem, or b) I can’t understand what the folks are trying to say. The problem has gotten so bad that I've advised my customers to permit me to replace a component at their (the customer’s) cost rather than tie up hours on the phone to *maybe* get a warranty replacement.

Dell is by-far the worst offender of the tech support industry. I've worked with Dell tech support for over 14 years. In the past they were sharp, reasonable, and always went the extra distance to help. I can tell many good countless stories about them. Now, however, it seems that part of their stratagee of moving tech support to India is to frustrate customers into spending more money rather than properly training their outsourced technicians for warranty support.

One example will demonstrate: A customer got a Dell workstation, which was one of 5 bought at the time. The workstation had a defective CD-RW drive. I spent hours on the phone with Dell tech support in India. The tech support consisted of me doing the same test 3 times. The drive failed all three times. I was obligated to wait on hold for 20 minutes between tests. At the end of this, the technician told me that based on our findings she could not replace the drive(?) But that she would have her supervisor call me right back. After waiting for an hour and getting no call. I called Dell tech support again. I asked to speak to a supervisor. Waited another 20 minutes, repeated the story to him. He finally said that they needed to prove that the CD-RW was really broken. I said that if they’d ship me a replacement, and if it didn’t solve the problem, I’d just buy the replacement and not send the original back. At that point he agreed. All told it was 3.5 hours on the phone and 5 days to replace an $80 part. Oh yeah, it took 5 minutes to swap out the part. It worked.

Microsoft paid support is not far behind Dell. Along with the hard to understand Indian technical outsourcing is an often flippant or dismissive attitude on the part of the tech.

I truly respect that the average person in India spends 16 years in school. I wish this were the norm for the USA population. And to be sure, I have no problem with the people themselves, but they simply don’t have the language skills. Due to this the underlying trend has become one of screwing over customers so that Microsoft, Dell, NetGear, Compaq et al, can save a few more $$. This is counter productive. Many of my customers have turned away from these companies because they can no longer get the support they did previously. Naturally, however, it is all but impossible for a company to turn away from Microsoft......

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...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"