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Matti Grönroos
Where Is the Support Located
The costs directly related to customer support will certainly decrease, but what about the other costs, and loss of efficiency? How much would it make inefficiency when two people neither of whom speak their mother tongue and who barely understand each other try to create a common understanding of what it is all about.
An offshore support potentially has a big question mark: Those customers who want to be served in their mother tongue.
The question on the location is much more multidimensional than about cost only.
The support cost has been under optimization for decades, and the instrument has been outsourcing routine tasks to countries where the average salary level is lower than in the Western Europe. Often this equals to India, which combines a relatively good education system and the salary level of expert lower than in Europe. (This is not to be generalized to the entire hierarchy. In India there are big wage gaps and even the middle management wants to get the same money as in Europe.) Earlier, the address was also Eastern Europe, but this trend is disappearing as the wage gaps between the east and the west are filling.
Software development projects in India have often been successful, but the experiences with Incident Management do not indicate fabulous victories.
The customer typically has rather simple expectations:
- Wants to understand and to be understood.
- Wants to have his or her issue resolved.
The IT companies often have an overoptimistic perception of customers' and end-users' ability and desire to get help with problems in English. Therefore, the customers' demand for using the local language may be a surprise, which the company is not prepared for.
A model where the user speaks the local language and the Service Desk a sort of Broken English, has proven to be quite challenging. Translating tickets has been proposed as a solution, but the translation may be on the critical path, at least timewise. Several translations steps are needed, at least one in each direction. If the user is to be asked for further information, the number of steps may increase quickly. Automatic translation has been proposed as a solution, but for many languages,automatic translation is far away from reaching maturity. In case of critical incidents, the translation steps consume most of the time-to-resolve targets. In practice, handling them in an offshore location might be a mission impossible. Instead, a local shadow support organization is needed, and it might ruin the offshore business case.
In addition, it is known from experience that incident reports created by the end-users seldom are clear and complete enough to be handled as such. Instead, further information needs to be requested. It may be necessary to have an editing step before the translation. This again increases both the handling time and the cost.
Of course, pricing can be used to impact to behavior when volumes are high: If the user agrees to communicate in English, a discount is given. But as long as some users have to be served in the local language, a dual organization has to be maintained, and the optimistic business case will not materialize.