Dell sending some jobs back to U.S. (outsourcing to reverse?)

In a surprising about-face, Dell Inc. is moving some technical-support jobs back from India to the United States.

The new U.S. employees will provide phone-based tech support for business customers, which account for the bulk of Dell's revenue. Dell employees in India have been answering some of those calls. Calls from individual customers will still be routed to call centers in India.

"We felt a little noise and angst from our customers, and we decided to make some changes," said Gary Cotshott, vice president of Dell's services division. "Sometimes, we move a little too far, too fast."

The computer company's quiet reversal comes as many U.S. companies are rushing to outsource operations to India and other low-cost developing nations. It suggests that the savings achieved by moving jobs overseas may sometimes be outweighed by the cost of antagonizing loyal customers.

"What (customers) said was, `You guys have been changing some things, and we don't like it as much,' " said Steve Felice, vice president of Dell's corporate business division.

It's unclear how many jobs the move might create in Central Texas, where Dell operates several call centers for tech support and sales and employs 16,500 people overall. Dell executives would say only that jobs will be added at call centers across the United States. Dell's other U.S. tech support call centers are in Nashville, Tenn., and Twin Falls, Idaho.

Dell was among the first large U.S. companies to move tech-support jobs to cheaper Indian call centers when technology spending plummeted three years ago.

The list of companies sending jobs to India now includes Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Computer Sciences Corp.

English-speaking Indian workers are highly educated but earn a fraction of American salaries. Some customers have complained they can't understand Indian workers because of their accents and that tech-support workers rely too heavily on scripted answers.

A recent Stanford University study estimates that Indian call centers have picked up 200,000 jobs since March 2002. Gartner Inc., the tech research firm, estimates that U.S. information technology companies will move one in 10 jobs offshore by the end of the year.

Dell's move "doesn't surprise me, but I don't see a broad trend to do that," said Ned May, an analyst with IDC, a tech research firm. "There's been so much attention to this that people have moved pretty aggressively. Hiccups were expected along the way."

Some companies have seen a small but definite decline in customer satisfaction. Yet executives have concluded that the cost savings are worth it, said Steve Lane, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group research firm.

"It's certainly fair to say that there's a general backlash against the idea of jobs going offshore," Lane said.

Dell executives left open the possibility that tech support for corporate customers could be shifted overseas again, if technical expertise and language skills improve there.

Nevertheless, Dell's about-face could provide at least a little "I told you so" comfort for Dell technical-support employees in Central Texas who were laid off in 2001. Dell cut 5,700 jobs that year, most of them in Central Texas, as the high-tech slowdown began.

Dell's worldwide work force has grown since then -- from 34,600 at the end of 2001 to 44,300 now -- but the growth has been heavily overseas.

In 2001, almost 68 percent of the company's work force was in the United States. Early this year, that figure had dropped to about 54 percent.

That trend continues: Last quarter, 56 percent of the 2,500 jobs Dell added worldwide were outside the United States, Canada and Latin America.

One reason Dell's employment has grown outside the United States is that the company is selling more PCs and other products globally, particularly in countries such as China and Germany.

Dell officials stressed that the company will continue to add jobs overseas as as its global business grows.

Dell's ambition to become a $60 billion-a-year company helps explain its responsiveness to the complaints of business customers.

The company wants businesses, schools and governments that currently use Dell Optiplex desktop PCs and Latitude notebooks to also buy advanced computers, such as servers or storage systems. Dell makes a bigger profit on those systems, which are supported by techs in the United States. It can't afford to antagonize its most profitable customers with poor support for PCs.

"Our corporate customers have come to expect a certain level of expertise," Cotshott said.

From that point on, I decided that if a client with a Dell needs a hard drive replaced under warranty, and they're not capable of working with Dell telephone support, that I'm going to send them to Best Buy or some other place to buy a hard drive,

Does that void the waranty? I'm serious, I can see Dell complaining that you shouldn't of opened the box as the magic smoke might of leaked out.

They should really sell computers with two hard drives in them for just this very reason.

To be frank, I've never had any luck with ANY technical support for ANY computer I've ever owned.

Same here. Well not in the case of a business owned Sun 65000, got transferred to a kernel developer on my first phone call. But then again they cost around $750k, which is a little outside of my home price range.

Does that void the waranty? I'm serious, I can see Dell complaining that you shouldn't of opened the box as the magic smoke might of leaked out.
They should really sell computers with two hard drives in them for just this very reason.
That's a good question. If you don't have their on-site service, and you're directed by a telephone support person to open the computer, then the answer would be no. OTOH, if you do this on your own, it might... But then if you don't go after a warranty replacement of the hard drive, Dell would never know...
Then again, I don't know if doing an upgrade to the computer (adding a hard drive, DVD-ROM, etc) would void the warranty or not, although the new parts would not be covered, unless you bought them directly from Dell.
The example I gave was for a specific situation, where a client didn't feel comfortable with running the diagnostics themselves, and decided to have a technician come out, at their expense. From the errors that they read off to me over the phone, it was obvious that the hard drive was failing, but Dell wouldn't accept that. In that case, it would have been cheaper for them to buy a new hard drive than to have me come out and run the diags.

Mark

Dell offers up to a five year warranty for government entities. At least a couple of Dallas/Ft Worth school districts wrote their bids to have a 5 year warranty, which knocked out virtually everyone else. Same for some federal contracts. Dell uses this to retain customers forever, rather than to increase their level of service.

There are store-bought extended warranties that will go out to five years, but, except in just a couple of cases, I have never found a store warranty to be worth anything. IMHO, warranties backed by companies such as Warrantech leave a lot to be desired.

Can you even imagine what a nightmare farming out software development to these places is like?

Actually, yes, I can tell you what a nightmare it is. I spent the last three years doing quality control with my employer and I can tell you for a fact that the code from India is among the worst I have ever seen.

Just try and get a bug fixed. You can include screenshots and complete reproduction instructions and they just close it out. "Not a bug" or "Cannot reproduce in lab" (!!!)

I've given several "No Go" assessments due to this...

The good news is the code from China is even worse. The interesting news is that the code from Russia is about on-par with India for the first drop, but they respond to bugs filed the same day.

Anyone I call for support (banking, computer, utilities etc.) at a U.S. company has a need to speak English. I will politely tell the worker that I cannot understand them; and that I MUST speak with someone whom I can understand.

And woe to the non-English speaking telemarketer that calls my home!!!

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