It dawned on me 10 minutes into a call to my new Internet service provider that I was talking to someone from the American Midwest. Whether he was actually located in the heartland wasn't easy to discern, but that accent was as corn-fed as any I had grown up listening to.
So I started keeping track of the accents at the other end of the phone line in the various call centers I had the pleasure (and displeasure) of doing business with, and a trend began to emerge. Gone was the predominance of foreign accents in favor of more familiar cadences and intonations.
The folks at Merced Systems, a customer operations performance management vendor based in Redwood City, CA, confirmed they are seeing this trend among their call center customers. It turns out that call center operators have discovered something that I believe manufacturers will soon come around to as well: It's hard — damned hard — to outsource quality, particularly to a distant land many miles and time zones away.
And that's why more call centers are being located closer to shore and why I believe more manufacturers will eschew foreign shores for capacity a little closer to home. There's a growing realization that, when it comes to quality, location, location, location may be the best guarantee of all.
This realization is certainly operative in the case of Denmark's Lego, for which offshore extends no further than the countries of Eastern Europe, which are in the same time zone and can be reached by a short plane ride or a daylong truck or train ride. And it's also the case for a growing number of U.S. manufacturers that are finding that "you get what you pay for" too often defines the relative quality of the goods they are getting from their offshore suppliers.
Of course, quality management is hardly rocket science, and is defined in depth in tomes such as Juran's Quality Handbook, the bible of the quality industry that must weigh in at 15 pounds. But applying good quality principles takes money, process, education, and experience, and many of those capabilities are in short supply in the low-wage countries sopping up the majority of offshoring dollars these days.
That's why the call centers are heading closer to home — and why manufacturing will, too. The call center is a particularly good place to look for the start of a trend because of the direct impact it has on customer satisfaction, and hence — according to a broad body of industry research — a company's bottom line. If you can control your call center's performance by accurately measuring how well individual agents and teams are doing, you can have an impact all the way to the bottom line. But performance management — including coaching agents whose performance is lagging — is hard to do offshore, and harder still with an outsourced workforce. So the offshore trend in call centers is reversing, to the better satisfaction of everyone.
Low cost will still dominate for some time, particularly in our consumer-driven society. But selling cheap junk isn't a long-term strategy, just as stranding customers in a dismal call center experience is proving to be a poor strategy. I, for one, will welcome the return of quality to the table. A dime a dozen just doesn't cut it anymore.