Thursday, June 23, 2005

Outsourcing Customer Upselling

One the serious problems of outsourcing is hardly touched one by mainstream media nor the traditional business press. While many of the stories focus on the loas of jobs, they don't often address the real problem, the higher hidden costs of outsourcing. I will give one recent example. I was recently called by my credit card company Providian about a program that would allow me to in the words of the telemarketer, "Save 50% at selected stores such as Wal Mart."

While listening to the spiel, several things struck me. One his accent while Indian, was very slight. Kudos to the training the telemarketer recieved. The other however was the broad cultural gap between the myself and the telemarketer. When he repeated again the claim that I would save 50% at Wal Mart, I asked,"Are you sure? That doesn't seem possible given Wal Mart's low margins." He stated yes I would save 50% at Wal Mart. At this point it became clear that the original telemarketing script stated that you can "save up to 50% at leading retailers like Wal Mart, Target and Fields." However in his eagerness to cut down on the length of his introduction, he simply reduced it to the one he had heard of, but clearly lacked any cultural references for understanding. So his repeated claim that I would save 50% at Wal Mart sounded silly.

I have shopped at WalMart and know they do not have a 50% margin in their products. (Indeed I would be hard pressed to find a retailer that had a margin that size outside of Tiffanys.) My telemarketer on the other hand has probably never been within a 1,000 miles of a Wal Mart. This meant he completely lacked the cultural references for understanding that his claim of saving 50% at Walmart were nonsense.

Modern outsourced call centers have cultural training programs and know where their callers are calling from so they can ask about simple things such as the weather. Lacking deep cultural knowledge means mistakes like this will continue to happen. Needless to say, I did not upgrade the service.