Vonage calling center

Posts: 8 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 16, 2004 Posts: 8

tta wrote:

Moto wrote:

You still have to condsider the ancillary costs to do business here. Since corporate american cannot budge those costs, it budges the costs it can, ie labor. That is why jobs are being elimiated.

So you're saying if american corporations CAN budge those fixed costs they won't outsource ? I doubt it. They will still cut costs, cut costs, cut costs (but do not touch the in-the-sky salaries and big bonuses of the top officers) anywhere, anyway, anyhow they can.

Ditto. Business calls for the maximization of profit; so the word contentment was never existent in business parlance.

Posts: 9 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 17, 2004 Posts: 9

At my last company, we had some serious internal debate over moving a call center from the deep south in the US to India. The financial people were behind it, but almost no one else was. The savings seemed ephemeral at best. The risks seemed high. There just wasn't much enthusiasm, it seemed like doing something because it was the thing to do.

The CEO finally made the decision and we did not proceed with the project. The CEO's decision was based on the fact that we earned more revenue from the particular US State with the call center than from the entire nation of India. (This company was global in scope.) I was really proud of the CEO, when he said something like "every job we export is one prospective customer we export".

The product marketing people produced some chilling statistics which further illuminated the issue. Only a trivial percentage of people in India were likely customers for any of our retail products. So, the 800 people in the south kept their jobs, the company is still doing well, even though I'm not part of it.

Oh, and, our biggest competitor DID move one of their frontline customer support groups to India. Turned out it backfired bigtime on them. The costs ended up being a lot higher than they projected. Plus, the people in India don't speak the clearest English on the planet. The lack of clear English speakers on the front line for billing, support and so forth turned off a lot of customers who switched to my old company.

It isn't just dollars and cents. Making a radical change in your business always has unintended effects. In my opinion, a lot of these "India" projects have been justified using, at best, suspicious accounting.

--Bill