The bigger picture

This article should be read properly - not just the usual offshore argument.

When you use a hosting customer, you are expecting them to provide as good as or a better service than you can provide yourself. Hosting requires a service provider to ensure the customer support is of the highest level. By outsourcing this support, you are putting a bigger barrier between the people who answer the phone and the people who fix the problem (without even considering where these support people reside). Telstra is obviously signalling its intent to pull out of the managed service market place, and allow their customers to wither on the vine or move elswhere.

@typical racial bigtory

I don't do business with companies who use off shore support - note off shore support, not outsourcing the two are totally different beasts. I don't care who does the job (in the UK) providing they do it well and provide good customer service, deal with my problem and resolve it to my satisfaction.

Fortunately I live in a democracy and I can make my own decisions whom I do business with, I'm not whining I'm making a decision to deal with UK companies who employ UK staff regardless of their ethnicity, supporting the UK economy. There is nothing wrong with being patriotic - its not racist - I think the UK is one country that does not by default choose products/businesses from/based in the UK, much to our own cost.

Similarly my experience of such call centres is that they operate over very cheap VOIP connections which leads to very poor call quality making it even harder to deal with the heavy accents and unusual grammar. As well as generally having to follow a script they can not relate to what is going on in the UK at the time so any general 'chit chat' you may have is lost whilst dealing with whatever your issue is, as they are generally working in a call centre they have no relationship with you as a customer (or the business they are providing support for) and their only aim is to answer the call and then 'resolve' this issue as quickly as possible so as to please the bean counters.

All credit to people who take these jobs on for trying to better themselves it can't be an easy task learning a foreign language and culture to simply get a job sat in call centre hell to then be confronted by people who don't want to deal with you. I guess one of the other reasons we all get so pissy with such operations is that we get hounded night and day by foreign call centres making sales calls neatly side stepping UK law on such activities.

Unfortunately some bean counters haven't yet realised that its a false economy to off shore business like this.