Callcentres - overseas outsourcing and exporting jobs, importing mediocrity

Draft 28DEC24 V0.2

WoteFix* required: Getting kicked down the lane

The arguments about saving money by outsourcing software development to India and CRM to call centres to anywhere English speakers can be found for £5 ph, have never really been discussed in a "public political" context by anyone that understands the real issues of quality control, security and the UK's national interest. Long-suffering UK customers have been forced to battle with foreign call centres for years and generally got nowhere other than "kicked down the lane" when complaining. Banks especially know how to exasperate customers to the point of exhaustion, when they give up and go away.

The use by banks of overseas call centres to handle sensitive customer data seems to have been curtailed or stopped after many experiences of fraud.  Other than simple intuition by "aware" managers, surveys have consistently showed customers prefer to talk with British accents - and most UK banks seem to have brought call centre operations back to the UK.  It is difficult to get honest answers from those using overseas call centres as this topic is on the awkward edge of racial prejudice. But few indigenous customers want to talk to a foreign voice for support, if a British alterative is available due to incompressible accents and poor outcomes.   The present situation is discussed here

Trustpilot report Lloyds Bank at 1.6/5 (Bad) with 80% 1-star reviews. 
"I was met with the rudest customer service employee in the fraud department called Tina. She spoke to me condescendingly and rudely..."
"Would give zero if I could." "Awful bank" "Should be NIL!"
"Joined Lloyds to benefit from their bonus £200 joining incentive. Met all the criteria, but now they say they won't pay up because of semantics. Really shocked a High Street bank would do this."

But as most banks seem to be as bad as each other, and they know the stress of changing bank means most users will just put up with dreadful service and soldier on.

Other than call centres, the major outsource industry used by UK businesses involves software development. This is FAR more important than the person on the Clapham Omnibus or jobbing politician can appreciate, since software is the foundation of modern business and life - and the UK has been using substandard developer services for 20+ years. Badly conceived, designed and tested software is the underlying problem with almost all online interface and support systems.

Pete North relates his direct experience...
...I once worked for a health insurer in Bristol. They'd outsourced their software development to India. My team was to refine requirements and test what they built. The system was built using Microsoft Dot Net libraries, but bizarrely the front end was shipping data it didn't need (the entire record) and hiding it on the page with JavaScript according to user permissions. 

I never claimed to be an expert developer (it's boring, underpaid, and hard), but I know that you definitely don't pull out the whole record set if you don't need to, and you only deliver data to the page if the user has permission to see it. I raised my concerns but was told to basically shut up. 

The Indian company assured us that the software was going swimmingly and would be delivered on time, but in my view required a substantial rewrite. My impression of Indian tech workers is that they're incompetent and dishonest, and whatever money was saved by outsourcing, it was gobbled up on the quality control we were having to do on our end. They were in for years of teething trouble. 

As it happens, the entire system could have been built by two competent UK based developers, and done in under a year, but the company was three years in, and £4m down on it, and weren't prepared to admit they'd completely fucked up. You couldn't trust anything the Indians said. They were always polite and deferential to your face, but every bug fix was a cosmetic bodge. 

Given that India is a global capital of data theft I wouldn't have trusted this company with anything sensitive. In IT, the standing joke is that if you don't know how to do something, there is always "some Indian guy" on Youtube with a tutorial, and there's no doubt about it. Many of them do know their shit. But the problem is business the culture. They have a blame culture where mistakes are punished, so if there's a problem, they'll conceal it and lie about it. That's bad enough for financial data but especially bad if they're working on avionics upon which lives depend.

I don't believe there is any cost saving in outsourcing to India. Ultimately, in a crisis, you need good working relationships, and you can't do that with partners who barely speak English, and you get a different operator every single time. They'll string you along and lie to your face. Following that experience, I won't even take an IT contract if there are Indians involved. Every developer I know can tell you a similar story. 

If there is a skills shortage in IT in the West, it's a recruitment problem (HR recruiters seldom have IT experience) and it's a pay problem. The industry demands twenty years of experience, intimate knowledge of obscure frameworks that have only been out for a year, while expecting to pay less than £40k.  It's a high stress job with huge responsibilities that require high availability, but employers still expect developers to work to the same shop floor rules as call centre clerks. As a career, I now advise young people to do anything other than IT. It's a mug's game, and it's not even creative any more.

Ultimately, Indians are favoured because they're cheap, subservient, and expendable, but business always ends up learning the hard way that cheap ends up being very expensive.

PN on X

*WoteFix- is an initiative to highlight discussion topics and subjects that need fixing but are not policy documents (WOTE will not be doing policy, remember?) but deserve to be noted and discussed with politicians who are smart enough to acknowledge and understand the significant bond of trust represented by the Wote Pledge.