Regarding Peter Chura’s July 13 letter to the editor, headlined “Nation’s jobs have gone overseas to detriment of U.S.”:
As the editor of the Outsourcing Excellence Awards, I come across quite a few instances where foreign companies send offshore work to our shore. Unilever (a British company) outsourced to IBM, a 2009 winner. But the most unexpected example was a 2007 winner. Indians sent their work to North America. Who knew?
Bharti Airtel is a leading Indian cellphone provider. In 2006 it had 30 million subscribers. It was on track to have 100 million by 2009.
Increasing call volumes had an unhappy side effect: shrinking profits. Company executives realized they had to control costs to build a sustainable business.
At the same time, the telecom provider wanted to take “a quantum leap” in customer care because management believed customer-care services would become a potent differentiator in the Indian telecom market.
So, how do you radically improve customer care and cut costs at the same time? Answer: outsource.
You would assume the Indians would select an Indian company. But they needed the best interactive voice response technology available and it wasn’t in India. The Indian cellphone carrier outsourced to Nortel Networks, a Canadian company. Of course, Nortel Networks India worked on the project, too. Someone had to write the voice scripts in Hindi!
Ah, one might say, Nortel is a Canadian company. Bharti Airtel probably would have come to America if an American company had the best technology. We didn’t and won’t if we keep cutting education budgets. But that’s another story.
Source:http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/jul/25/foreign-companies-are-outsourcing-here/
