Neil Lathwood’s Blog

I’ve never been a big fan of companies outsourcing any part of their business to a foreign company to save money.  The bad press it has generated since it became popular to do has been quite substantial but it hasn’t put companies off doing it to save money - and lose business. I mean, is it really that cost affective to shift say your entire support department over to somewhere like India to save on wage and infrastructure costs but in turn, more than likely, lose at least a handle of your clients due to the lack of support that they may now receive?

Some companies are now making a big deal out of advertising that they don’t send your calls to anywhere other than say, your local branch like the Natwest do. Having today had to deal with, only briefly mind, but that was long enough, a company who have outsourced their support centre to India, it left me thinking that I could never even remotely consider outsourcing the support team I have to India. After the two calls I made with little joy in getting the information I needed, I didn’t know what else to do! The first phone call that I had the luck of having to make ended with me thinking that you wouldn’t want that type of company managing or having anything to do with your company. I called an 0871 number to speak to someone in support to try and get a number redirect working, when I was told that they couldn’t assist because basically they didn’t understand what it was I was referring to, they asked me to redial and press the same option I had for the current call!!!

I stated that surely that would just get me back through to them again and was told, “maybe”?!?! Unbelievable - but I tried anyway
So what happened, well I’m sure you can guess, I called, pressed 1 for support and got a lovely person on the end of the phone - from the same call centre. So went through the same thing as before to see if I got anyone else with at least some clue. Of course that didn’t work and I should have hung up a long time ago, or not even bothered to actually call them back in the first place.

To top all of this off as well, not only could I not speak to someone who understood our account and knew what I wanted or could point me in the right direction but the website for the company had zero contact details that were of any use or actually allowed me to speak to someone in the UK. Not what I would call customers service at all!

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