GOODBYE BANGALORE, HELLO PORTLAND

Wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, to make a telephone call for tech support, or customer service, or to make a purchase, and speak to a real live human being who is based right here in the United States of America? Help might be on the way. “Impossible,” you say? “People in India are willing to work for a fraction of American wages, so companies that need to serve the public will hire them instead of Americans.” In recent years, hundreds of thousands of American jobs have been “outsourced” to India and other countries that have a strong base of English speakers. For some American companies the experiment has not worked. Complaints from U.S. customers about their problems in dealing with incompatible accents and robotic personalities have caused many companies to “insource” those jobs back to the States. Now along comes a company that has not experimented with outsourcing. Most of their communications have been through email. But they have begun a daring and costly program to win the hearts and minds and dollars of their U.S. customers. The company is Netflix, and according to the New York Times it has opened a call center in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, to handle all customer dialogue. Reason? They are losing customers to Blockbuster, which last year began a program that allowed DVD renters to exchange their rented discs at Blockbuster stores, thereby eliminating the need to wait a few days for a Netflix disc to arrive in the mail. Blockbuster, of course, has well-stocked rental stores all across the country, and Netflix has none, relying solely on the mail to generate its business. The Customer Is Always Right---Except When a Computer is Involved Particularly in service businesses, customer satisfaction is the engine that drives profits. Netflix carefully surveyed the market and found that an outstanding percentage of American Netflix customers wanted to discuss their DVD renting questions with Americans Netflix human-being-customer-service-reps. Person to person. On the phone. Not online. Not across the Pacific Ocean. Not “please-leave-a-message-when-you-hear-the-tone-and-we-will-get-back-to-you-as-soon-as-possible.” So they have invested millions of dollars to create a 2007 version of “taking care of business.” Will they succeed? A lot of people who are growing increasingly angry at having to deal with outsourced personnel certainly hope so. So do people who have lost their jobs because of outsourcing. If you’re not happy with the telephone service you’re getting as a customer of any company, complain! If they don’t hear from you, they will assume that you don’t mind talking to someone 7,000 miles away. Use your search engine to locate the home office address of any U.S. corporation, and write/ phone/ email to the VIPs in charge of Public Relations or Corporate Communications. It will take you less time than you’ll have to wait on hold to talk to someone in Bangalore. One more tip: While you’re waiting on hold to talk to Bangalore, go to www.gethuman.com. It’s a unique data base that will show you how to get directly through to a real live human being at hundreds of major U.S. companies. (No guarantee that you won’t get a Bangalorian human again, but that can be better than weaving your way through those diabolical “menus” or sitting on hold interminably.