Google Wades Further Into Hardware With "Nexus Call Center" 58
An anonymous reader writes with this bit from geek.com: "One of the big complaints surrounding the Nexus 7 launch was the lack of customer support when dealing with the device. Google was not initially prepared to handle the volume of users that required support, which led to an increase in wait time for callers who needed solutions. However, we've recently received word from a source that now Google is using a third party company to staff a call center for the release of the next Nexus devices." Maybe Google needs to out itself as a "devices and services company," too.
Re:Iutsourced call centres are worse. (Score:5, Interesting)
No exceptions.
If you want to provide good support, you train well paid, dedicated staff with a high retention rate.
Otherwise claiming that you support your products is just a very expensive PR stunt.
There are differing qualities of outsourced call centers. My company needed a build a 10 seat call center staffed 6am-midnight localtime to handle reservations and questions, we had several known peaks throughout the year where we'd have to double the staff to handle special events. We ended up outsourcing the whole thing to an airline call center that also does outsourcing (our product was a travel product so it was a natural fit). They dedicated 6 lead agents to us, we flew them to our location so they could learn about our product, then we did on site training at the call center for an additional 20 agents that would be floaters that were assigned to us as-needed. One of our staff members went-onsite during the first 2 weeks to help them take calls. answer questions, and build out their knowledge base of frequently asked questions, then we always had local staff on-call so the contact center lead could call with questions.
Worked well, few callers knew that our call center was not "local". And while their service was not "cheap" when you compare their per-hour rate to what we'd pay a local agent, overall, we paid about half what we would have to run our own call center (and had nearly unlimited capacity to handle calls). Since they had the ability to dynamically size the pool of agents that took calls for our product, we only had 6 dedicated agents, where if we had a local call center we would have had to have 15 or more dedicated agents to handle normal call volume (we'd at least 2 shifts to handle the 18 hour day), with more during peak periods.
We got consistently positive feedback on our call center, and I really think that outsourcing let us provide a better experience than if we tried to build it in house.