I worked for Dell until mid-2008. They decided around then my job would be much better done from a call center in India. Flash forward to last week or so. One such Indian technical support agent had apparently been called up to help her find and view pictures a customer had on her hard drive, but couldn’t remember where she’d put them–I used to get calls like that all the time. They used to take maybe an hour, if you happened to have a customer who was particularly clueless when it comes to something as simple as “Now don’t touch anything for a few minutes or I won’t be able to control your computer from here.”. They used to be so simple I could do them in my sleep. And they used to still pay me at least $100 for the assistance–hey, I didn’t make the policies or force them to call me. They used to not end like this.

A woman calls Dell tech support to ask for help in locating pictures of herself on her computer. The pictures end up on a newly created Web site. She accuses the support representative of creating the site.

Would it be too cynical of me to figure the agent in question didn’t actually end up fired from the outsourcing center he works for? It’s articles like this that kind of make me very glad I don’t actually ever really have to pick up the phone for something unless they’ve already screwed it up.

Apparently, according to the article, Dell’s in the midst of a lawsuit over it. I can see this going full circle in the near future–lawsuits in New York among other places were, after all, what lead to them opening up more call centers in North America after all, for all the good it did. What was that they said about hindsight?

Comments on entries are closed after 6 months. If you'd like to leave a comment, there are much more recent, and relevant, entries on the front page. If your comment is related to this entry specifically, you may send it to me directly.