|
by Joshua Greenbaum, Contributing Editor   | Abstract: | In a reversal, companies are starting to pull their call centers back on-shore to improve service, and manufacturing will soon follow their lead. |
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. [Click to continue] |