After having used Dell's offshored customer support, I can state that these people are certainly not skilled in either conversational English nor PC technical support. Very strong accents, and entirely script-driven. They also tend to be rude when you try to break out of their scripts.
Our organization has over 7500 Dell systems. It was sometimes difficult working with their American tech support, but even the smallest problem was agony with the Indians. However, Dell didn't seem to mind burning up hours of satellite time on one call, or sending three parts out before the one I really wanted arrived. At least, not until their corporate customers started to really complain.
American companies desperate for instant cash savings see offshored tech support as employing PhDs with perfect English, and instinctive knowledge of the product. In reality, they're getting people who work for one-tenth the pay, but do one-tenth the productive work. But that doesn't show up on this year's balance sheet.
I have not yet had a single encounter with an offshore tech support that I'd rate as good as even a medicore American operation. The unspoken ground rules behind all this controversy is that Americans are overpaid, someone else working for one-tenth the cost is world-class, and clients won't notice the extra grief they have to put up with.
The Indian Ph. D. with perfect English and an instinctive knowledge of the product tend to start their own companies, often in the US. It's a CIO dream to think one can really buy three times of something at 1/10 the price.
I haven't yet encountered the strong foreign accent, but in my experience all tech support is script driven. I would love to do buiness with a company that had a second tier of tech support for folks who build computers.
I built a server last year that included a $500 Adaptec Raid controller, which didn't work. I could tell from the symptoms that there was some incompatibity with the motherboard, but I had to go through three weeks of painful and repetitive diagnostics before the motherboard manufacturer agreed to take the whole bundle in house for diagnostics. Sure enough, the card and board wouldn't work together without slowing everything down.
But even at that level of technology, everyone insisted on working through the script. My complaint is that I had done the entire script before making the first call, and I had documented all my steps in an email.
After reloading all software three times at the behest of the Dell pros from Bangalore, it was a tech rep. in Tennessee who had the bright idea to run hardware diagnostics on my Dell 4300 that revealed a failure on my hard drive.
Not to worry. Dell sent out one of their crack Indian H1-B hardware reps to install and genuine reconditioned hard drive that I fully expect to fall apart in another three weeks.
And the good thing about all this is I'm learning to build my own PC from the motherboard up. High time too. I'll do that before I ever buy another Dell.