Here are the pros and cons of offshore (foreign) outsourcing of customer support functions.
Distributor personnel probably aren’t aware that when they call a credit card company, the person they are talking with could be located in India, Russia, China or some other foreign country. The term for moving customer support and other people-functions to a foreign country is “offshore outsourcing,” and it’s a hot trend that will continue growing. Offshore or foreign outsourcing of customer support could even be used by the companies that provide the business software used by most PHCP, HVACR and PVF distributors. Let’s look at why this trend came about, and its pros and cons for distributors.
Money, as usual, was the reason foreign outsourcing came about, and it was software developers who started it. Thirty years ago foreign companies were creating software for their part of the world (e.g., Asia), and eventually these companies were hired to do programming for American firms — because foreign companies paid their people much lower wages. But the data transmission circuits back then were so slow and unreliable that the programs created abroad were shipped to the United States in the form of physical media (such as tape reels); several iterations and shipments were usually needed to get a clean program. So, even though labor abroad was cheap, the need to ship programs stretched the development cycle to the point where few American companies used foreign programming.