The Chief

Bang on you couldn't be more correct!!!!

Trout

iTrader: (1)

Yep - India and China will have the West for breakfast within twenty years.

Indeed China could choose to bankrupt the US tomorrow if it called in its loans on trade!!!!!

Of course for us in the west there are two choices - fight it and lose or roll with it, join in and win

jasey

I used to work in Peterhead and one of the locals was a purchasing assistant.

One day he was on the phone to some poor sod in Engerland ordering stuff. The closest language you can get to Peterhead can only be described as SEAGULL.

This idiot was getting more and more frustrated at having to repeat his seagull speak - when he came off the phone he turned to me and said.

That boy's spakking a diiftnt langarg.

Which is seagul for That boy is speaking a different language.

I told him it was probably English.

He sqwaked and got on the phone again.

Lee247

My comment was not aimed at you. But, when I want to talk to someone about my hard earned savings, I want to make sure I can understand exactly what they are saying.
Again, good luck RB170

Deep Singh

What a sad bunch of ******* you are. It used to be:

They come over here and claim benefits

Then it became

They come over here and nick our jobs


Now its

They stay over there and nick our jobs


Oh and those Indians from India speak with bloody Indian accents, how dare they??

What a load of cr8p!! People harping on about how they won't deal with someone who speaks with an accent.

Insecure people will always look to someone else to blame.

I can't be bothered to go any further because most here are retards that have never travelled beyond Spain.

ps Rannoch and others excepted

merlin

I lead a team of software researchers / developers. Most of the team is in the UK but we have 2 people in India. As part of the job we have to "think out of the box" inventing new ways to solve the latest problems that come our way every day. Unfortunately the Indians seem incapable of doing this. They need spoon feeding the whole time. If anything they are actually a drain on productivity.

We also have a QA team in India. They seem to take great delight in finding problems totally unrelated to what they are meant to be testing. When we ask them to reproduce the issue they invariably find the problem has gone away. Again this is not helping productivity.

Rabid

With respect Deep I understand what you're saying but let me give you an example.
I ring my car insurers and start talking to a nice polite lady with an strong Indian accent. I can understand her so no problem. I start to explain I'm buying a new car and would like her to arrange for a covernote to be faxed to the supplying dealer so he can put road tax on the vehicle and I can drive it away. All's going well upto the point she says

"What have we to do with sending the tax for your car"

I then spend 5 or 6 minutes explaining that in the UK we require road tax and that various documents are required to obtain it, one being insurance cover note that she can provide.

I then spend another 4 minutes having a farcical conversation trying to confirm the postcode and address of the dealer for her. I admit I do have a regional accent so maybe that was the problem? However I'd expect anyone who works in a call centre to understand the phonetic alphabet or failing that be able to understand the concept of one ie A for Apple.

My problem is that at the end of the call I had no confidence that the cover note was to be sent so ended up ringing again and asked to talk to a supervisor.

It transpired that the note was to be sent to an entirely different postcode than that I'd requested.

In a nutshell my stance is this- I don't give a flying **** where the people who work for such a company are based. I don't care about their race, sex or even if they support Man Utd. What I want, no demand, are people I don't have to spend 10 minutes explaining their fecking job to.

This wasn't an isolated incident either, I've just had a problem with my credit card (I overpaid, they shut down the account for no reason and there is £100 of my money sat in credit on a card that doesn't exist!). Guess where I got through to? A call centre in India, man who keeps telling me "yes sir we have closed your account for you"-----------AGHHHHHH "NO YOU HAVEN'T CLOSED IT FOR ME, FOR MY BENEFIT, GIVE ME MY FECKIG MONEY BACK YOU USELESS *******" (but polite and calm)

Did I get my money back? Did I ****, account being closed ASAP and moved to a company who employ people who can understand what I'm saying.

merlin

...

merlin

...

Rabid

it came back!

paulr

No,but if company x car insurance was £200 and company y was £220 but had a uk based,call centre where you got straight through to a human i'd go for company y.

In fact i do,Direct Line,havent bothered with a quote for 10 years cos i'm so pleased with the service levels.

Deep Singh

I take your point and understand. However I have dealt with enough UK based call centres from Inland Revenue to BT Broadband to Councils who have not had a fecking clue of whats going on and have wasted hours of my time. Its not exclusive to Indian call centres.

I do honestly understand your legitimate concerns though. Its just that there were some usual Scoobynet type ignorant comments here.

Personally the only time I ever deal with Indian call centres is when I'm being cold called, so I'm wondering who you guys deal with eg

1) I bank with Barclays and Natwest and always deal with UK centres

2) Credit cards with Barclays, always UK centres

3) Car and home insurance with Norwich Union, always UK centres

4) Mobile phone with O2 always UK centres

5) Healthcare with AXA PPP always UK centres

6) Same goes for Income protection/life assurance and so the list goes on. So who are you guys opting for that means you end up dealing with overseas centres????

davyboy

Who can offer the cheapest rates LOL

These guys crack me up.

Rabid

on my part that's bull

bank- lloyds been with them since the eighties, call centres in India and the UK

insurance- norwich union, call centres in the UK and India, been with them for 4 years

Don't choose the cheapest just want good service and those companies have both just lost my business.

davyboy

I'm sure they are gutted.

Rabid

A reply of such crushing lameness that it doesn't even register on the
troll-ometer. Were you feeling tired? I'm sure you'll try harder when you feel less jaded.

Anyway if enough long standing customers such as myself leave these companies for their rivals the chief execs really will be gutted as they'll be shown the door.
I can't believe the crushing naievity of such tactics. I can understand the sense in farming out simple stuff but is p1ssing off customers who you make good money from really a good business plan?

jasey

But retards (more than most) need their call centre staff to be able to speak something approaching engerlish .

Trout

iTrader: (1)

Don't you guys see the irony in all this?

Here you are on a website celebrating the ownership of a JAPANESE car built by the same JAPANESE industry that wiped out good old British Leyland in its heyday.

And for those of you who can't use a map - Japan is even further away than India.

If anyone on here does not use globally branded and manufactured products that took jobs out of the hands of your grandfathers and fathers then feel free to criticise the use of offshore resources.

New_scooby_04

iTrader: (4)

I think you'll find British Leyland wiped out British Leyland. The Japanese just benefited from the custom that it's collapsed caused. They also deserved the success, they made more reliable cars. Simple as that!

As for the serious issue of multicultural employment: the right person for the right job is my view. What is being debated here is whether the outsourcing is justified on a quality basis, and whether it is fair that companies should be free to -in effect- force redundancy on a perfectly competent UK workforce , which encompasses people from many backgrounds, soley to get labour cheaper in a different country.

Lets not obfuscate the issue and lower the tone of the debate by suggesting that people don't want to see individuals get jobs purely on the basis of their ethnicity etc.. It's the ethics of quality vs costs that is being debated.

Ns04

Trout

iTrader: (1)

I was not in any way suggesting that people get jobs based on ethnicity - I was underlining the irony that the geography was in some way part of the debate when we all benefit in a geosourced economy a point you seem to have missed in your enthiusiasm to debase my post. Many jobs have already been lost in the geosourced economy - it is just that these ones are rather more direct.

Of course if you want serious facts then here are a few.

600,000 IT professionals in China
590,000 IT professionals in India
85% of the global CMMi 5 organisations (the highest IT process quality standard) are based in India
3m graduates per annum in India
120,000 engineering graduates with a 2:1 or better degree, per annum

The raw facts only tell a small part of the story.

The real story comes when the power of these economies is put into application.

I had a suite of applications that needed moving as the office was being physically moved in the UK. There were 44 FTEs, around 250 outstanding user requests, no new developments and an old system that had a batch cycle of around 14 hours. Service levels were around 94%

The work was moved internally in the UK however the handover was slow and not successful.

The estimate to fix the service levels and batch cycle time issues (a longer working day was paramount to service customers better) was over £5m.

After a year of not fixing this problem it was decided to move it to Bangalore.

A bunch of 18 month graduates took over the system in three months. The UK IT staff refused to sign off handover as they did not believe it was possible that they could support it.

After this protruded stand off - the work was finally located in India.

Within a further three months after handover the service level was 99.98%, the batch cycle was reduced from 14 hours to 4 hours, the user request backlog was reduced from 250 requests to zero.

Oh, and finally there were only 22 FTEs now required to do all this difficult work.

Even better the business users and the end customers were now getting much better service.

So, as you can see in my view I completely agree with you that work should be located with the best resources for the job.

Rannoch

Rabid

Where the product is made or where the service is provided from isn't the issue for me.
The issue is if the product is crap I'll take my business elsewhere. Using the car analogy broadly speaking I don't choose marques from Korea or latterly from MG Rover because I perceived them generally to be rubbish. Similarly I'll avoid companies with call centres in areas where people don't understand what I'm trying to say. Broadly speaking in my experience this has been call centres in India. If I was to switch to a company with UK based centres that had similar comprehension difficulties then I'd be decrying them.
It's nothing whatsoever to do with location for me.

New_scooby_04

iTrader: (4)

Firstly, apologies, my reply was responding to your remarks and those of Deep. The first part of my comment was in response to your remarks about British Layland. The coments stand, BL was a god awful creation and was largely responsible for its own demise. I do take your point about the irony in respect of a geosourced economy. We do indeed benefit from this in many respects, however, the question of the extent to which the kind of "farming out" that the orginal poster is complaining about is desirable in terms of sustaining a stable employment base in the UK si one that needs to be addressed. It's not a black and white issue, nor one which affects all sectors of the UK employment market equally, I suspect.

The second part was more in response to Deep, who's post seemed to reflect a more simple rebuttal of the "deytookerjerbs" metality- I should have made that more explicit.

I'm not part of the IT industry, if you say the workforce is better qualified out in China and India, then I'm more than happy to take your word for it. However, wasn't the issue raised by the poster more to do with poorer candidates getting a job soley because of economics, i.e. they were cheaper to hire, not because they were better qualified?

Ns04

Trout

iTrader: (1)

NS04,

I agree about the quality of the argument. The original post

did not comment on cost or quality. I feel there were a number of naive responses about the rationale being that of low cost is the only driver with many anecdotal examples of how bad the quality is.

I merely wanted to underline two points - the quality standard is being set by many countries that are supposedly low cost and developing and secondly we in the west are happy to reap the fruits of their labour.

Of course with service jobs specifically suddenly it is all the more direct. With manufacturing is was less direct. Poor quality here leading to a shift to elsewhere. You are right about BL, however without a higher standard and lower cost product being available elsewhere then BL would have limped on for years. It was the ease of availability of this higher standard at lower cost that highlighted quite how shambolic some of our domestic industries have been.

An efficient market can appear to be a cruel and harsh environment, however a market is made up of buyers, sellers and all buyers and sellers are ultimately people like us. Something to think about

jasey

The IT industry being a prime example. One of the main reasons We've developed a system that allows us to generate VB Systems in a fraction of the normal time.

The company I left three years ago set about replacing a legacy system. In that time we've developed the system that generates systems, and generated 14 end user applications that are all live. The old company are still using the legacy system.

Throw technology at problems - not people

Trout

iTrader: (1)

davyboy

I'm currently using my Chinese manufatured PC to type this, sat on Swedish furniture.

When I go home in my German car, I'll sit down and watch my japanese TV with an indian meal on my lap finished off with a few Belgian beers.

English people, they just don't trust foreigners!

The Chief

New_scooby_04

iTrader: (4)

That may explain why you're not working!

SJ_Skyline

I've always wondered: How many of the BNP fascist knucleheads like eating Indian and Chinese food!

davyboy