Customer service department is a very important department in every company because the people whom customers contact with the company in the first time are always customer service specialists. They provide any information about the company and products. They have to deal with any complaints and requests from customers. They also present the image and culture of a company. However, such important department is no longer part of a company in many companies. Why? Because most of companies in developed countries want to save the human costs, they outsource their customer service department to local companies or some companies in developing countries which specially dedicate to customer service business, especially in tele-customer service. Company don’t have to recruit employees and spend much money and time to train them. Professional customer service companies have more experience to deal with all kinds of customers with lower costs.
source:http://www.i4cp.com/productivity-blog/2010/06/09/should-companies-outsource-hr-to-be-more-strategic-or-to-save-money
Many U.S. companies will outsource customer service department to the company in India. The reasons are as follow. First, English is the national language. Most of Indian can speak fluent English. Moreover, Indian people like American movies, music and TV shows. So they also know some American culture. How do Americans talk to each other, what kind of words Americans will use. Second, human costs in India is so low. Compared to the living standard in India, the living standard in United state is about 7-8 time. For example, people spend 5-6 dollars for a happy meal in McDonald in US but it costs only less than one dollar in India. Average salary in customer service industry in India is 6000 dollar a year but that in United State is 60000 dollars. Company spend the same amount of money which can hire ten people in India but only can hire one person in United State. Of course, company will chose India. Finally, employees in customer service are easy to be trained. Customer service doesn’t like R&D need very long time to train a person having professional knowledge. Company can teach employees what the products are and how to talk to their customers. Normally, there is a SOP in customer service. Employees only follow the rule to deal with all customers’ need.
The same situation happened in China. Many companies whose customers speaking Chinese outsource their customer service department to China. Additional, most of their target markets are in Asia, the same time zone. Companies can care less about different time will bring some trouble. Since outsourcing in emerging countries are so popular now, If you want to create a customer service company in emerging countries, what should you pay attention to? First, pronunciation. Even though speaking the same language, it is easy to distinguish the native and the foreign. Most of customers will feel weird and don’t trust the customer service specialist coming from other countries, especially coming from the countries with lower living standard. Fortunately, customers can’t see specialists’ faces and only hear their voice. As a result, only customer specialists can be trained like the local person and know about local language words, most customers will not discover their specialists coming from other countries. Furthermore, understand people’s working habit and culture in emerging countries. Management is a professional knowledge. It is difficult to manage a team especially the team members coming from different country. There is a old saying that the key to manage a person is manage his heart. In order to understand what your subordinates are thinking, you have to know about his/her culture and personality.
Next time, when you call the customer service and the people answering you are coming from other countries, you don’t have to feel uncomfortable. This is popular and with the globalization and the development of internet, there is no boundary between every country.
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