Outsourcing your customer support is like holding your customer up against the wall and punching their kidneys until they cry.

There was once a time when if you bought a computer, or a car, or a rubber dildo and you called the company to speak to a representative who could help you set it up, fix it, or insert it into something you would speak to a representative of the actual company. Not anymore! Now when you call technical support for your computer you're going to get a call centre which is run by a private company offering cheaper support options to the people who built your computer. A lot of these call centres are in India, and it's quite amazing how many Indians are named Steve (even a girl), but even if you get an American call centre you are still going to encounter one severe problem that every outsourcing company shares: the people just don't give a shit about your product

I used to work for just such a company. A call centre who took calls for HP, MSN, and Comcast cable. I was in the HP section, supporting their desktop PCs. At the beginning I was dedicated to my job, I was a good little worker. I followed flowcharts, I used the horribly designed internal database (they had a problem with Google), and I always arrived on time to work. But after dealing with one too many Texans who just couldn't get their damn modem to connect to the internet - which actually meant he couldn't turn his computer on - I started to feel... different. I began to think that HP was being kind of monstrous about some things, and on at least two occasions were were specifically ordered to lie to the customers (once was a large-scale theft in a repair centre, another was regarding our location - we weren't allowed to tell them we were from Canada. We had to say "a few hours away from Seattle").

But what led to my feelings of dissatisfaction and disgust with HP as a company? There is a long list of issues which I probably shouldn't get into (but don't buy an HP Pavilion computer, ever). What's important is what happened next. My coworkers and I came to a few great ideas about ways we could make our work days more interesting. We came up with the "Average Handle Time Challenge", which was to get your daily call average as low as possible. The best way to achieve this was to "punt" your calls, which meant tell the customer they needed to contact another company or department and then disconnect the call. I came in second plate behind another guy named Pete, whose name may or may not be changed for his privacy. Pete managed to pull off an average call time of less than three minutes in an 8 hour day. That means that he took approximately 160 calls in one day - and we were only expected to take between 25 and 30 in a day (15-17 AHT). I came in second place at 4.5 minutes, and the other two guys were around 9 and 11 minutes each. The second was the "Average Handle Time Challenge 2.0" in which we tried to have the LONGEST average handle time we could by keeping customers on the line unnecessarily. Again, Pete was the winner here, after he successfully kept a customer on the phone for 14 hours. Not only did he win by taking only one call all day, but he earned 6 hours of overtime for it. His customer ended up returning her computer to the store, and kept him on the line while she drove to the store, exchanged it, set up the new computer, and made sure it worked. He quit that job a legend six months later.

The fundamental problem with outsourcing is that people like me just don't care about your product. You will find that is the case of most of the people who work at the call centre. Even those who seem to care about your product are typically aiming for a promotion as fast as possible because they all realize sitting on the phones is chump work. You deal with assholes all day, you get paid a mediocre salary, and it's all for a product which at the end of the day you probably hate.

Add to that problem the fact that these companies are getting greedy. Earning millions of dollars every year isn't enough, so they outsource from American call centres to Canadian. You have to pay a guy in the US $15 per hour to do tech support, but in Canada we'll do it for $11 per hour. In India it's $2 per hour, which is why you hear so many Indians on the line now. The company wants to sell you the product they made (in China) but after that they don't want to hear from you again until it's time to buy something. Do you want to buy a computer? Call up their sales department and you'll be getting an American. Want to speak to the CEO? His secretary is American, he's American. But you need help? Fuck that shit, send it to India.

There is another problem in this mix. Customer support is a terrible job. I did it for three years and I will never do it again. You spend the entire day talking to people who are only calling you because something is wrong with their computer. They blame you, regardless of the real cause of the problem, and they want it fixed now and with as little work as possible. Many customers actually believed there was some magic "fix all" button they had to press. Well, I had a "fix all" button and it was right below my "accept call" button. Oops, that's not "fix all", that's "end call". Sorry, asshole.

As long as companies continue outsourcing their support, dealing with support is going to be a nightmare. Your emails aren't read, they are sorted by subject line and responded to by a computer. Your phonecalls are an endless circuit of recorded voices until you finally get through to a guy with a thick accent. At the end of the day you are talking to a guy who is just counting the hours before he goes home, waiting for a female voice that sounds hot who he can keep on the line as long as possible and maybe write down her email address and phone number to call her in the middle of the night breathing heavily.