Friday, March 30, 2007
Marketing From the Third World Isn't First Rate
If you want to know the weather in Bangalore or Mumbai, don't go to weather.com, just answer your home phone.Companies are offshoring their customer service departments faster than you can say "tax loophole," and now telemarketing is tapping into the large international English speaking population by transferring jobs overseas.
Now I'm not a protectionist, but for me, hiring someone who, as is often the case, is difficult to understand because of their dialect as the first point of contact in introducing a new service is a bad idea. If the company really wants me at a customer, they should be providing the most knowledgeable, easily understood person to broadcast their initial message.
Even though I'm on the do not call list and filter my calls, I still get 3 or more calls per day from mortgage services that employ call centers in India. As soon as I hear someone who is obviously from India talking, I politely tell them I am not interested in mortgage services.
Customer service is different because the company already "has you," and for many services it is easier to deal with the system in place than find a new ISP or wireless carrier. And certainly we import billions of goods from Asia, but consumers don't usually judge the company that sells them dishes or toys based on where the product was made because it is not tangible to the end product.
But marketing is about image and consumer confidence, and to hire people with whom it can be a challenge to communicate (and this goes for poorly trained semi-literate Americans as well) tells me that the company doesn't really want my business.
Posted By John Gartner at 12:36 PM
Permanent Link: Marketing From the Third World Isn't First Rate
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