Dell has an answer for customers who have been put off trying to communicate with call center agents based in India. You can speak to an American - for $12.95 a month.
According to a report by The Washington Post, Dell is running ads promoting customer service "based in North America" for consumers who buy new PCs from the company. For the monthly fee of $12.95 or an annual contract at $99, customers are guaranteed to get someone to help them with technical issues in two minutes or less.
Dell hopes that the Your Tech Team service option will satisfy consumers while enabling it to maintain its profits. The company, while declining to give numbers, said it is happy to the initial response to the service.
Bob Kaufman, a spokesperson for Dell, said, "We've heard from customers that it's hard to understand a particular accent and that they couldn't understand the instructions they were getting. This illustrates Dell's commitment to customer choice."
According to The Post article, companies can save between 50 and 75 percent by locating call centers to nations such as India. The tradeoff is that some consumers have problems communicating with customer service staff and come away unhappy with the brand.
David Inns, chief executive of Jitterbug, a cell phone company based in the U.S. that has its call centers here, said, "What's missing from those estimates is what the impact is on customer satisfaction and what is the impact on first-call resolution."
"This is not a protectionist philosophy," he told The Post. "At the end of the day, my data and experience say that Americans are better at providing customer service to Americans -- that's all."
Sharmila Rudrappa, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a native of India, said, "I hear people say all the time that people who complain about call centers in India are being racist or nativist -- but it's not as simple as that. If you need tech support, it already shows you're having a crazy time getting your Dell computer to work. And when things go haywire, you want assurance, you want familiarity, you want someone to hold your hand and say it's okay. What you don't want is to have to work at understanding the person on the other end of the line."
Discussion Questions: Does relocating customer service overseas make business sense when serving American consumers? Have American consumers resigned themselves to having some trouble understanding the accent of support staff? Are companies properly accounting for overseas call centers, i.e. quantifying the cost of customers unhappy over communication issues?