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Thursday, November 29, 2007

Well, Since You Axed...

I got a call at work, Xerox wanting my opinions about their service levels. Well, it wasn't really Xerox calling, it was some woman in India. I wouldn't say her accent was thick, at least no thicker than a bank vault door. In fairness, I could understand her most of the time, and when repetition by one of us was necessary, one additional iteration did the trick.

So we're clear here: I'm not bashing Xerox. Or venting xenophobic hatred or anything of the sort. Besides, the caller's English was so much better than my any-other-language-at-all, I can't really criticize. I could study Hindi for ten years and probably be far behind her English skills.

Thing is, I have to call Xerox on average a couple of times a month, not because our DocuColor is deficient, but because we use the hell out of it. The print quality is on par with an offset press, better in some instances (it's pretty forgiving of low-res photos and screened images while having good, crisp type and vector output). But things go wrong. The touch screen has gone out on in twice, and it was brand-new in February, so maybe some design issues are there as well, but mostly we just keep wearing shit out.

Used to be, when I'd call Xerox support, I got someone in America, and this someone could often walk me through a fix over the phone, getting us back up and running sooner and avoiding the need to dispatch a technician. When we were having networking issues, one even took an hour and a half to walk me through various solutions that didn't necessarily even involve the DocuColor (though, being a network printer, if the network was running the DocuColor was running). I even took the trouble on that occasion to make sure her boss knew what an above-and-beyond help she had been.

Then, three or four months ago, this same phone number started to be answered by people in other countries. Montego Bay, St. Lucia, and I think New Dehli though the gent I spoke to today says not the latter.

And, to put it mildly, the level of phone support fell off the cliff. The workarounds suggested became non-sequiteurs, answers that clearly demonstrated misapprehension of the question. More and more often, it's meant the Xerox tech has to call or come to the shop to resolve the issue.

So back to our survey, when I was asked to rate things on a one-to-five level, there were areas I could give three to five marks, but there were a few I had to honestly tell her 'One.'

Turns out, this is recognized by Xerox for what it is: a red flag. Hence the gent who called me today. A gent who, in the course of the conversation, allowed that he had been one of those stellar call center staff I got spoiled by before the Outsource began. I didn't ask him how many other extremely competent and dedicated employees were axed when some Vice President of Shithead Moves* decided he could add shareholder value at the cost of customer satisfaction.

The same VP, no doubt, instituted a system where the surviving phone reps would follow up when a surveyed customer expressed less than satisfaction. Not that he'll do anything about it, not in a company the size of Xerox. This is a company that has come so close to the Darwin Awards so many times it proves Michael Milken's thesis that a large enough company is no risk even with their unrated bonds.

But if I can tell they've outsourced the job, that right there is a problem. Because I never thought maybe I was talking to an immigrant in Phoenix or Dayton, I knew from the second sentence I was talking to someone on another continent. They spoke English, but they'd never spoken it around anyone who didn't have their accent, meaning they had as much trouble understanding me as I did them.

Memo to the Executive In Question: You get what you pay for. Someone who will do the job for a third the price would not do so if they could do it for more. Of course, in the case of Xerox, the VP who outsourced a very good call center is judged solely by the wages because the board of directors is not calling in for service. And honestly, if the quality was there, I'd have no complaints. I respect India's boom, China's too. I believe the bigger the economy, the better in general. But with a call center, you're selling communication, and that's not as easy to outsource to the third world as cotton mill work...

*Full discloser: I've been a victim of this kind of stupidity, so I'm biased. Not wrong, I'm biased in favor of the honest truth.. Last December I was traduced by an asshead who thought he could outsource me to India. He found, quickly, that he was wrong about that, though he's still threatening my former coworkers with the notion that the job could be done for a third the cost by independent contractors. This is a lie, one I called by offering to be one of these contractors. At $6 a job and free to pick which jobs, I could easily make $200 an hour off TradeNet. They weren't dumb enough to pay me that, but they've continued to pretend like they could replace their best and most experienced employees for pennies on the dollar. The pisser of it is, the so-called leadership there wants the rewards of integrity without actually having the annoying costs of integrity.

Postscript
The next day, the head honcho for Xerox support in the KC area visited in person. He was under the impression that I wasn't happy with the technician who came out, and he was very concerned. I explained to him that it was really only the phone support I had a beef with, that the tech did a fine job. So whatever deficits the upper echelons of Xerox's executive ranks, the front lines take customer satisfaction seriously.

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