Devoted to Help Desk and Technical Support personnel and applications

Many U.S. companies who have fallen into the trap of outsourcing their IT departments have learned all the disadvantages the hard way.  The decline in service that companies suffer after making an outsourcing transition can be harsh on company profits, but tracking that back the outsourced IT department takes intuitive research.  Being in IT as long as I have, I can tell you that there are two fundamental problems with outsourcing outside of the US.  Lack of IT experience and language barriers cause significant down time.  All of these problems can be avoided when the steps are taken in the beginning.

Lack of experience - IT Outsourcing outside the US became popular around 1998, but after the initiation of the 2004 corporate tax breaks, outsourcing IT jobs was the new best selling idea for Corporations.  The first time I was forced to deal with a 100% scripted IT support call was when I had to call Dell about a hardware problem in 1999.  The person I was talking to did not have the basic understanding of what he was asking me to do.  I had to keep explaining that I already knew what the problem was.  I had already done the troubleshooting.  I was an IT specialist myself, and I knew what was wrong, but this person was trying to follow his script.  I explained that the evidence supported I had a bad motherboard, but he could not grasp what I was saying.  "OK, I know the logic behind what you are saying, but as I said previously, I already checked that.  Let's move on the next part of your script so we can get to what I have already explained.  I need a new motherboard."  A call that should have been 15 minutes wasted 45 minutes of my time.

There is no more effective way for a company to set themselves up for IT disaster, then to remove a host of people who have put years into designing an IT network for a company, and replace them with less experienced people that know very little about your business.  I heard second hand how one company suffered tremendous losses the first day they switched their network over to a large outsourcing company.  They had three "Severity 1" outages on the same day.  

Language Barrier – In the help desk business, you need to be well adjusted to the various English dialects around the US and around the world.  Recently I realized good my ear for dialect is when I was assisting someone with a strong accent at my desk.  After he left, two other people turned to me and told me they did not understand one word he said.  Among the top complaints of outsourced call centers are the lack of English language skills.  Many times this is simply a problem of understanding dialect.  Sometimes the person in the US cannot understand the person overseas, but too often, this is a problem where the call center personnel cannot understand callers.  

Since most outsourced help desks are in India, I decided to check on the percentage of people who speak English there.  85% - 90% speak their own local state languages while only 5% speak English.

So how can US companies avoid these pitfalls of outsourcing overseas, and still save money?  There are many lower-cost outsourcing alternatives located in small rural towns that have setup help desks.  The cost of living is lower in these locations, and that savings translates to lower costs for IT support.  Sometimes these even equate to tax breaks from state governments that are rewarding large companies with job development incentive grants.