Support has been farmed out to India

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 08, 2005 Posts: 6

Vonage has sent their customer phone support to India. I do not support this business practice and will be leaving Vonage for another VoIP provider.

Posts: 26 · Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2005 3:28 pm Post subject:

I don't know if this is true.

I've called CS a few times (especially for my LPN issues) and I was always put through to someone in the US.

I called CS for my mother-in-law yesterday and it was somebody in the US too.

I'm sure some of it has been farmed out, but not all of it, but I can say the same thing about almost every mid to large size company out there.

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 08, 2005 Posts: 6

called once yesterday. Spoke to a US chap. called twice today. Both times today I asked what city they were in. Both times today they said they were from India.

There is no reason for a company to ship work overseas. The cost of doing business is marginally more expensive here in the US but there are english speaking areas of the US that can come close to matching costs for overseas help. Both India Customer Support operators were reading from an script. They are working poor. They are being taken advantage of by US companies.
Greed is the reason for moving jobs overseas. Anyone tells you different they are lying.

Posts: 15 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Mar 02, 2005 Posts: 15

Selecting the No Dial tone option from the 1-Vonage Help support menu will take you to India. I was told this by a NJ support tech. So, AVOID it unless all you want to hear is reboot your router, now try port 2.

I don't necessarily condemn Vonage for sending support to India, but I do for not fully training them to do anything but the above, and for not sending you on to a level 2 tech after one or two tries. Hell, I was wondering if they get a bonus for who keeps the caller rebooting and switching ports the longest.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 08, 2005 Posts: 4

Today, I spent a mind numbing hour and a half getting walked through SCRIPT TREES by polite people who know nothing about the inner workings of VOIP. The real crime here is they made me feel stupid over and over.

Note to Vonage: Customers do not like to made to feel stupid, they take their business elsewhere and tell friends not to use the service.

Back to the story... Two jr techs and a supervisor all tried to walk me though the same script tree, I guess because they thought the other guy did not know how to do the job. Well, it turns out the script trees fail when you approach the level of factory reset on a VT105v, and since they have no real technical knowledge, they keep saying the same thing. "Now, [name here] please click Start>Run and type ipconfig, what do you see [name here]?" I see my BP rising faster than your stock price and your ability to use people with no real skill (other than the language and the scripts) a complete disservice to your customers.

Posts: 8 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 08, 2005 Posts: 8

carylisa wrote:

Both India Customer Support operators were reading from an script. They are working poor. They are being taken advantage of by US companies. Greed is the reason for moving jobs overseas. Anyone tells you different they are lying.

Let me see if I get this straight: US Companies are greedy because they offer poor people from India better paying jobs than they would otherwise find locally.

In any case, I've been recently helped by India customer care and they are, for the most part, clueless. It's not their fault. It's normal for customer care to be clueless, wherever they are in the world. But they quickly forward the call to Tech Support in America after I explained my problem.

One must not forget that, for the most part, users are even more clueless than customer care.

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 08, 2005 Posts: 6

so if i run a business in the us i have a choice. i can hire local talent or take my business to the lowest cheapest locale i can find in order to save %10 on labor costs. I can pay my domestic local hires $15-20 per hour plus benefits or build an infrastructure for millions and hire international untrained labor for $3-5 and hour without having to play benefits or abide by us labor laws. The cost savings delta is about 10% but I do not have to worry about the law, employees health or their retirement. The overseas government will give me tax breaks and provide education to the international employees. The US government provides tax breaks for me to send my money over seas. The millions of dollars in infrastructure goes to overseas companies and not US companies. Meanwhile the overseas employees are still living in third world conditions because the wages are still lower than the average skilled wage available in the country. The jobs that are offered as customer support are entry level low paying jobs. The good jobs are not in CS but in programming. So the Us company gets cheap poor labor and the money goes to the middleman in India. To think the CS employees get good salaries is to live in a dream world. They still live in poverty, just they have marginal jobs. Reading from computer a script will not provide the training they need. Learning to program computers will give them the lift they need to get out of poverty.

By the way. CS support hourly rates in India are 10% of what a programmer makes. CS does not require any training, not even English classes. Programming is different. Friends in India who write code make 25% of the salary they could get in the US. They do it they some day can move here to the US. Don't believe what the US companies tell you. Talk (or chat) to folks from India to get the real story. No benefits, sexual harassment, violence. The government and legal authorities look the other way if the employees complain.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 08, 2005 Posts: 4

Wonderful, I've been in the business for 20 years and when I tell the people on the other end of the phone what my problem is, what I have done, and what the results are (including data from trace route, and either trace), they start with the Script Tree - Is your cable router plugged in [name here].

Posts: 10 · Posted: Sat Jul 09, 2005 10:45 am Post subject:

its not just you US chaps that are having jobs moved over to India, the same here in the UK is happening too, my main gripe is I cannot for the life of me understand them half the time (not just Vonage but various other companies I subscribe to as well), in my view, most of their knowledge is substandard and they read a script to try and fix your problems (only the PPPoE was hampering me, I got it fixed Myself in the end) but what do you want for a couple of bucks an hour, a Microsoft Tech Specialist? coz you ain't getting that buddy, their training is off the back of cereal cartons (Mrs Patels Crunchy Curry flakes most likely Razz

)

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 03, 2005 Posts: 7

It's bad news for those of us who need a real answer to a question and not some scripted reply that has no relevance. I know, it's happened to me. After calling again, I got a US Rep and everything was resolved.

Please Vonage, listen to your subscribers.