So I got the new People magazine today (as you know since I quoted it in my last post) and I came across an article titled
Is This Woman a Threat to the American Worker?. Obviously about outsourcing so I started reading it. "The caller from Maryland is furious: Her long-distance phone bill is too expensive, and she wants an explanation. Maumita Biswas, a customer-service representative for the woman's Dallas-based phone company, is on the other end of the line." Dallas-based phone company? Hmmmmmmm. "But she isn't in Dallas -- she's more than 8,000 miles away in a booming metropolis in southern India, where cattle roaming freely on the streets pass by sleek new office buildings and giant billboards for Bollywood musicals......Company rules discourage her from telling customers they are talking to an operator in a foreign country, and Biswas and her colleagues make an attempt to echo the American accents on the other end of the line." An attempt is right. "If asked where she is, Biswas simply says the phone company, VarTec Telecom, is headquartered in Dallas." Now, I wasn't shocked because I know we have a center in India. I was, however, shocked to be reading about it in People magazine. Out of all the companies that outsource to India, why was VarTec picked? The article goes on to say that this lady makes $210 American dollars per month. No *wonder* companies outsource. Even the $10/hr American call center worker makes $1600/mo. "But it's no consolation to workers like former call-center employee David Benarrous, 33, who was laid off by VarTec from his $26,000-a-year job just about the time the company shifted operations to India two years ago." It also talked to a lady who worked for VarTec at a center in Tulsa until it too was shut down because of the transition of operations to India.
Now, my questions are: 1. Did VarTec know about this article ahead of time? 2. Are they going to do any damage control? I'm sure customers are going to tell us about it. 3. Did they know that Indian reps were talking to the press? Is that against their contract? They *do* discourage offshore agents from revealing where they are located, so are they just going to accept this article and all that goes with it? It was just very surreal to be flipping pages in People Magazine and come across an article about my own company.
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