The Truth About Outsourced Call Centers

The more I experience and read about outsourced call centers (foreign or domestic), the more I’m convinced there has to be a better way. This post in The Consumerist today is, on the surface, about an insider’s run-in with an identity thief, but what I take away after reading all the comments is that the customer service industry is deteriorating from the inside-out.

The bottom line is, it’s cheaper for corporations to lose customers and expose them to criminals than it is to retain and protect. The effects of these decisions may not appear on the balance sheet until long after the executive has been promoted for his brilliant, cost-saving strategies. And so it goes.

Call center agents are forced into sweat-shop policies at worst, or competition with their client’s directly-employed staff. Customers then take their frustrations out on the agents, instead of the managment that gets bonuses based on volume instead of satisfaction. And so it goes.

At Trustworthy, we aim to change all that. Our agents are happy = The customer is happy = Our clients are happy. If even one of these truths fail, we aren’t being Trustworthy.

Do you have any “insider” horror stories to tell? We’d love to hear them here in the comments. The more we know, the more we can help.