IS THE OUTSOURCING BUBBLE BURSTING?

Dell admits it has “learnt its lesson” after being forced to drop its Indian call centre last year after customer complaints about the quality of service.

The call centre operation for the OptiPlex desktops and Latitude laptops was moved back to the US and, in an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Dell CIO Randy Mott said the Bangalore centre was unable to deal satisfactorily with the volume of calls generated by the rapid growth of those product lines.

Outsourcing makes sense sometimes, but I think it became a bit of a management fad in recent years. I expect we’ll see some more backtracking along these lines.

UPDATE: Reader Don McGregor emails:

A friend of mine who works up in the valley for a major chip design firm says their company looked at outsourcing, but had heard about too many
IP issues. Things like patents and trade secrets are not necessarily respected by the population, employees, or the courts in low-wage countries.

They weren’t too keen on having their chip designs stolen and used against them, and having no realistic recourse to the courts for protection.

Yes, there are all sorts of issues that don’t show up in a one-dimensional cost-based analysis.

UPDATE: More outsourced customer-support horror stories.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here. And a reader says that Dell is still outsourcing customer support for its low-end products at ferocious pace. I hope not.