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Dell to Add 1,200 Offshore JobsDell announces plans to put 1,200 jobs in Canada and the Philippines.
By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist
According to published reports Dell, Inc. is planning contact centers in Ottawa, Ontario and the Philippines to employ a total of 1,200 people.
Approximately 700 people will work at the Philippine center and 500 at the Canadian one.
According to eChannel Line Canada Dell has "signed a lease for 156,000 square feet of office space at 2500 Solandt Road in the Kanata region in the west end of Ottawa" for the center. It's expected to begin operations in February 2006, and will provide technical support and sales for Dell North American customers.
Outsourcing has been a mixed blessing for the Round Rock, Texas, computer vendor. It's cut costs tremendously, but sometimes at the expense of quality of service. In a widely-publicized incident a couple years ago, Austin, Texas-based computer consultant Thomas Cameron called Dell for customer support and was routed to an offshore agent in India, where "…it took over 5 minutes for her to just get my name entered correctly. Then -- and I am not kidding here, folks -- when she asked me what OS I was running, SHE ASKED ME TO SPELL WINDOWS!"
After many such complaints, in 2003 Dell began rerouting some technical support calls from the United States away from India to United States-based customer service agents.
Presumably having learned from such experiences, eChannel Line says Dell chose Ottawa for the customer contact center expansion "because of the availability of skilled labor and proximity to institutions of higher education." 45 percent of Ottawa's workforce holds a university degree, college diploma or certificate and can be expected to know how to spell "windows."
In addition to a recently-opened center in Edmonton, Alberta, Dell Americas has customer contact centers in Texas, Tennessee, Oregon, Idaho, Oklahoma, El Salvador and Panama.
And Dow Jones is reporting that the world's largest personal-computer maker will begin hiring people in the Philippines in a couple weeks for a call center to handle technical and customer support for retail customers. The center should open in early 2006.
Dell has also run into trouble outsourcing "aspects of its account management and purchase requisition processes to an offshore service provider," according to Mark Smith, CEO of Ventana Research. Smith tells Business Intelligence Pipeline that "the simplest tasks of consolidating accounts and invoices and processing address changes are now sent overseas to India. These seemingly innocuous changes have introduced delays and made it more difficult for Dell to maintain its reputation for high-quality customer service."
Saying they predict most of their corporate growth will happen outside of the United States, this past May Dell officials said the company will add 2,000 more employees, the majority of them in call centers, to their India staffing.
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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:
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