You wait for 15 minutes and then you hear, “Hello this is Aditya, um I mean Adrian. I’l be happy to try and help you.”
“F————- give me someone who freaking speaks English!”
Try finding someone who hasn’t had that interaction run through their head when calling a customer service line.
Here is a novel idea for bringing jobs back to America: stop giving us someone in Hyderabad when we call for help with a problem. Can you legislate that? Because it’s a protectionist policy Americans of all stripes can get behind.
We have 318 million or so people and only 2.6 million customer service representatives actually still in the country, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics. Please, Mr. President, haul in the big banks, airlines, credit card companies, and mortgage service providers and tell them to bring back these jobs. Aside from the economic benefit, the national karmic happiness quotient would increase geometrically.
If we all write a petition for it, Mr. Trump might actually do it. It’s the kind of story he would love. And if he doesn’t get it at first blush, let’s get one of the senior advisors and have them whip out a phone and try to change a plane reservation during a winter storm warning. Bam. There will be war on the outsourcers.
It might not be that simple. The big issue in this area of the economy is that the chatbot is coming to eat the Indians. Indeed Facebook Messenger and other chat applications are the biggest threat to a whole range of industries that now rely on human customer service reps (however infuriating they may be) to help sort out problems. Conceptually it’s kind of simple. You type in what you want and through the magic of artificial intelligence “the bot” answers with a set of pre-programmed responses that allegedly get smarter over time. So you’re on Facebook Messenger, or using Amazon Alexa, and you want to book a flight. You type in, “fly me to Miami.” The bot says, “ok, cool you usually like to leave in the morning, but not too early, so how is the 9am flight from O’Hare? Oh, and the Loews, where you normally stay is sold out, but there’s a new option right next-door.” Facebook or Amazon or your favorite cha/bot provider, collects a toll on the transaction of course.
Now repeat this kind of process for issues with banking, paying bills, and sorting out insurance claims. So now you’re saying, sure but there’s always something which is too complicated, and “damn it, I want a supervisor!” Maybe then you’ll get someone in the U.S, but the top of that pyramid is probably going to pretty small.
This will all take a little time to develop. So, meanwhile, like everyone else, the outsourcers are making a show of hiring at home. One of the nation’s largest customer service outsourcing companies, Alorica Inc, says it’s creating 420 jobs in Houston after a recent acquisition of a private equity backed company called Expert Global Solutions. Alorica now employs 100,000 people around the world. To make a career over the long term there you’ll need to beat out the bots, and the Indians. The number one job criteria, patience.