Surely, not every technician-group in India will be super-duper, but isn't it also Microsoft's responsibility to choose and train the right one? It'd still be cheaper.
And obviously, noone is implying that tech support in India is inferior to anywhere else? A bad tech team could jsut be waiting for you in Ohio, serving Dell customers.
You're absolutely right and MS does do a lot of training. I used to see blue badges running off to India for 1 to 3 month tours. The problem is that the good ones immediately get hired away. This is one of the reasons why I'm not seriously worried about outsourcing when it comes to my job. India IT wages are growing and growing fast. Outsourcing simply won't be worth it in a decade.
One other peeve about India. I'll preface this by saying that it certainly doesn't apply to EVERYONE. There are very notable exceptions. However I think there is a cultural difference that hinders good support. As you know, most call centersl operate on a script. They also have a set list of instructions to follow for each problem that occurs. Dell's India support is notorious for this. If you have a stinking CD-ROM issue that you've already diagnosed, you have to go through all the troubleshooting steps AGAIN before they'll send you a drive. The point is that many techs in India follow these scripts and they do it well. However when it comes to being quick on your feet or thinking out of the box, they kinda fall flat. I'm not sure if this is a cultural thing or a management thing. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Lumberg type telling each associate to follow the script or else.
Let me illustrate:
A customer called India with a blue screen issue. The blue screen was due to a PTE (Page Table Entry) depletion. The customer was running Win2k3 with 4GB or RAM and SQL. The India based tech ran through all sorts of troubleshooting steps, including gathering a memory dump. The tech knew what a PTE depletion was and knew that the common cause was having /PAE and /3GB in the Boot.ini file at the same time. However he never checked it because the system only had 4GB of RAM. He spent hours talking to the customer about the issue, gathering perfmon logs and such. Eventually he called into the Bronze queue (escalation queue) and got me. They were less than a minute into describing the problem when I asked if they had checked the boot.ini file. The customer said no. After a brief sigh I asked him to do so. /PAE was there but no /3GB (at least the customer knew enough to NOT do that)
You see, what the India tech didn't know was that Win2k3 automatically enables /PAE when 4GB of RAM is used, even though it doesn't need it. The reason is that the OS supports hot swappable RAM and figures if you already have 4GB or RAM, you might want to add more in the future. The problem is that /PAE cuts your available PTEs in half because it uses them to extend the 32bit memory addressing to 64bit. The India tech didn't know this but if he had only done the one basic thing of checking the boot.ini file, the problem could have been fixed in SECONDS instead of HOURS.
I ended up taking ownership of the case and had the India tech drop the call. I think informed the customer that if he was surveyed, the survey would apply only to me and not to the India tech and I asked him to take that into consideration (he did) I also informed him that he would be receiving an email from my manager asking him about his experience and that he should be VERY FRANK in his reply. I ended up getting the V-SAT on the survey, but the customer ripped MS a new hole in his reply to my managers email. That email got well up into the executive level, but I'm not sure anything was ever done.
That brings me to another point about MS support. One of the biggest problems is their survey method. During my time there, I got exactly ONE D-SAT survey. The customer gave me all 9's (the highest) but gave the product all 1's (the lowest) because he was ****** off with IE. The customer actually was the one that screwed it up but I was able to fix it within seconds by running a script to re-register all IE .dll files. The customer was EXTREMELY happy with me but because the entire survey applies to me, I got the D-SAT. I really pride myself on my work so I was ******, as you might imagine. If you ever get a call escalated to MS Premier support and get someone in Las Colinas, Canada, or North Carolina you'll find that they do an absolutely INCREDIBLE job of support. If you get India you're screwed.
Oh, here's a tip:
If you call the India desk, identify yourself as a US Military officer. Tell the tech that this is your personal computer but you can only let an American Citizen work on it because there is sensitive information on it. You'll get through to the LC or NC every time.
