Translate

Friday 16 February 2007

Dell Hell

Well, where to start. At the beginning seems a good place. I bought a new laptop before Christmas after my old one appeared to die an inglorious death. A Dell seemed to be a good idea (I was relying on their old reputation), and so I ordered one. 15 days later it arrived, but with a couple of faults.

Offshore Call Centres Are Not Great Experiences ....
Offshore Call Centres Are Not Great Experiences ....

This was the start of a wonderful adventure via a very polite, but totally inept, help and support sections in Bangalore. I soon discovered that being able to speak 'Inglish' and understand English are two completely separate matters. They listened and thanked me for my custom, which apparently was "valued", but they then proceeded along the line of least discomfort for them. i.e. They resolved nothing.


Four or Five phone calls and well over 35 emails later, I finally snapped and started hunting for someone in Dell Europe or US who could possibly take responsibility for the issues and resolve them. It took a while but eventually I found a customer advocate in the US (there being no such thing for UK customers) named Todd, who, whilst he couldn't do anything himself as I was a non US customer, passed me over to a lovely lady in Eire, who took matters in hand. I am now awaiting a replacement machine.

Of course it means I have had to clean out all my work and documents from the machine, wipe the unused memory and restore to factory settings (Ctrl F11 on Dell screen if you are interested). I did this mainly because one never knows where the machines are going to end up, and there are some cunning West Africans out there.

Anyway, whinging aside, this set me thinking on the predictions of the growth of the Indian economy based on "I.T." and call centres. I discussed this with a beer buddy, who also works in I.T. and we both easily came up with examples of out sourced programming sent to India, and then requiring a full time UK team to 'fix it' when it comes back from the Indian programmers. Couple this with the anecdotal stories about call centre problems similar to the one I have just detailed, and one begins to suspect that the Indian dream economy is based on smoke and mirrors.

The motivations for work being sent to India (and other similar sites) is the low cost, the availability of English speakers and the number of "graduates" (BA Calcutta failed?). Accountants love this, and proudly claim their bonuses based on the number of job losses in the UK, US or other Western economies. However the real costs e.g. the lost customer goodwill of anyone having problems getting themselves understood, or the hidden project costs of having to correct all the work in the UK when it arrives from these sites, are never shown against the "savings" made by low wage costs.

In reality there are actually no savings, and the fact that many of these call centres are being returned to the UK or US, indicates that firms are beginning to twig that "all the glitters is not gold". One bank in the UK is now advertising the fact that its call centres are in the UK, in order to capitalise on the general ill will that these overseas call centres have created with those firms who persist in using them.

The I.T. work in India will persist for a while, because Corporation bean counters use formulas that indicate the these divisions are "Gold Rated" because they hit all the check points, whilst the western staff are "always late delivering". The fact that they are late because they are having to correct the work done in India, in order to deliver the product, does not show up on these formula charts and is therefore not obvious.

I will give an example: A large multinational corporation (who I can't name for legal reasons), out sourced their code development for a particular project to a third world country. They told them that they had to meet a list of criteria and benchmarks, such as documentation standards, reviews, walk-throughs, feedback etc etc. Every couple of weeks they asked the developers if they had performed this task, or met that check point, and the answer was always "Yes". Rave reviews of this Gold Rated division were passed around the organisation as all the check points, and benchmarks, were met or exceeded. After three months the product delivery date was approaching, and the product was to be passed over for user testing. So the head office rang up the development division and said "we are really pleased with your performance in meeting all our criteria, and we want to know when you can pass the product over for testing" ... and it was at this point that the developers said "it's not ready".

After further discussion it turned out that they had not written one line of code. They had spent the whole three months meeting the documentation standards, and had done nothing else. Gold Star, Gold star, crap! The contract was cancelled, and the multinational had to buy in UK Contractors to do a rush job, so that they could deliver something to the customer. There is a moral to this tale but I leave that for the accountants out there to explain.

This was a bit of a digression, but I think that there are indications that the Indian economy is being built on a quick sand of delusions concerning the quality of their work, and the cultural differences that speaking a similar language can't hide. Unlike China, were the work ethic far exceeds many western economies, and things work, the Indian model is just a facade built on top of a crumbling infrastructure.

I am aware that this thought is based upon nothing more than an observation of a couple of instances, but I suspect that I am not the only one to have come across these types of examples. 


Outsourcing Makes False Savings
Outsourcing Makes False Savings

Of course until the small child pointed out that he was stark naked, The Emperors "New Clothes" were being praised. So until someone points out the flaws, the Indian economy will be praised as a "miracle", and Western companies will continue to outsource based on false savings.


6 comments:

  1. Never buy a dell. The customer support is woeful at best. I should know,my work stopped dealing with them as a result of the indian call centre staff and their inadequate ability to comprehend the english language, never mind the computer in question.
    Check out http://www.illwillpress.com/vault.html

    And look for Tech Support I + II. Says it all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I also purchased a laptop from DELL.
    I did all on line.
    No problems until I got a completely unsolicited phone call fro DELL. As I gave a delivery address that was not where my credit card was registered would I please give them my address. I told tem no. They persisted and I told them to cancel the order.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am currently going through a complaint by numbers (or is that join the dots?) with DELL europe. It was as bad, if not worse than you describe. I can't get them to do anything so I am looking for a contact number and wondered if you still have that US or Irish number? I would appreciate any help.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sorry, I had it for a while, but lost it as I don't have any active Dell Machines anymore - which kind of tells its own story about the 'success' of Dell's strategy for the UK LOL.

      But try these

      Customer Care (01) 204 40 14

      What support does Dell provide me for my Dell Product?

      From memory, I think I tried a US Dell contact which put me through to Ireland based staff.

      Delete
  4. Update: My current employer has fallen into the same trap, and outsourced IT development and Testing to India. You can only imagine what is slowly unfolding about this decision .... I can't say any more than that.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Last update ... after 18 months or more of escalating bills from the Indian test company, but very little in actual results, the contract was cancelled (or allowed to expire), not too long after the IT Director who had hired them 'left to pursue opportunities elsewhere'.

    In fact during the whole period of the contract with the Indians, the company had to employ two or more UK testers on highly paid contracts, who actually identified around 85% of all bugs raised (and 100% of all the serious bugs).

    The Indian firm was not exactly value for money identifying few if any serious bugs ....
    Today the share price is just a fifth of the value it was, before the I.T. program that included the outsourcing started.

    Lessons learnt = None (they will probably do this again). False boost to Indian economy = £nnnn ... exact contract costs were not made known.

    ReplyDelete

All comments are welcomed, or even just thanks if you enjoyed the post. But please make any comment relevant to the post it appears under. Off topic comments will be blocked or removed.

Moderation is on for older posts to stop spamming and comments that are off topic or inappropriate from being posted .... comments are reviewed within 48 hours. I don't block normal comments that are on topic and not inappropriate. Vexatious comments that may cause upset to other commentators, or that are attempting to espouse a particular wider political view, are reviewed before acceptance. But a certain amount of debate around a post topic is accepted, as long as it remains generally on topic and is not an attempt to become sounding board for some other cause.

Final decision on all comments is held by the blog author and is final.

Comments are always monitored for bad or abusive language, and or illegal statements i.e. overtly racist or sexist content. Spam is not tolerated and is removed.

Commentaires ne sont surveillés que pour le mauvais ou abusif langue ou déclarations illégales ie contenu ouvertement raciste ou sexiste. Spam ne est pas toléré et est éliminé.

Followers

Blog Archive

Its a Pucking World

Its a Pucking World
Dreamberry Wine Cover

About Me

My photo
A middle aged orange male ... So 'un' PC it's not true....