In an interesting tale of two companies, Apple has dumped its experiment in offshoring telephone support to India after just one month. Meanwhile, Dell is rapidly expanding its offshore tech support. What's going on? Apple, while not perfect, consistently gets high ratings from consumers for support. Dell, on the other hand, has been receiving a steady stream of criticism lately for poor customer support.
I attribute the difference to finances. Apple is extremely profitable, and seems to have figured out that taking good care of customers pays off over the long term. Dell, on the other hand, is on the ropes financially and appears to be trying to save its way out of a money hole. In my experience, cost-cutting at the expense of highly visible parts of the company like customer service never works out well. Dell's slide will likely continue.
Personally, I have rarely had a good experience with offshore customer support. I've observed two chronic problems. First, the heavy accents, even with someone who might speak English as a first language, often makes conversations quite difficult. And second, offshore staff seem to be often stuck following a script when trying to figure out what the customer wants. If the problem doesn't match the script, they can't adapt. I find that less so with American-based customer support (though not always).