I laugh at your pain. And to add to injury the prevalent state of the world:

A lot of companies with call centers are switching over to India with record levels of lulz as a result. The bottom line is slashed by a significant amount (I don't even know what they get paid but it's hilarious compared to our already low-paid call takers here).

Let's take an example. IBM made a bid to be the sole provider of AT&T USA's HD support 6-7 years ago. I forget. It's been a while. From what I recall, IBM gets about a million dollars a month for the contract, and there's a penalty if the performance is not up to par. But the penalty is nothing compared to the contract price. Hohoho you can see what is going to happen.

First of all a million dollars is very little when it comes down to what the cost ends up being. Usually it's paid to wages which is higher than the one time set-up cost for the system and the access and the etc. For example let's say a Canadian agent makes 37,000$ a year. And a manager makes 60,000$ a year to be simple. By the time I was promoted the call center taking 75% of the calls (canadian agents) were 10 agents.

so 10 = 75%

13 = 100%, give or take.

13*37000+60000 = 541 000$

holy crap that's half of one MONTH of service fees. WHAT THE HELL SO BLOATED THE PROFIT ALREADY

But wait there's more. Making ~22x the cost of running the actual service (ignoring the service managers who deal with the fine print and the big picture,which would probably add 1-200 000$ to the cost per year; they handle multiple accounts and their pay is split between all of the contracts) is not enough profit margin. So they offshore everything to India. The savings shoots up to like 44x profilt and thus allows for more room for bloat.

The result is lowered customer relations and satisfaction.

As for the countries used. It's usually India or in rare cases the Philippines. Both very cheap places to live. I often joke that I want to live in India while telecommuting for my Canada-based job. Oh God I would be a god in that country.

The moar you know.mp3