we are considering moving our help desk function to eastern europe.
this function provides remote network support for our customers based
in Ireland, UK and mainland Europe.

My question is if the offset in salary costs is worth the extra effort
when compare with the setup and ongoing management of setting up a
remote location.

I have visited sofia in Bulgaria, but the spoken English is not as
fluid as I feel our customer would expect.

We are considering an office with 2 network engineers and 2
developers, I'm not sure it's worth it, however we could grow on it if
it proves successful. Has anyone tried this ?

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Request for Question Clarification by answerguru-ga on 13 Jun 2004 19:17 PDT

Hello ripperie-ga,

Many, many companies have tried to outsource their customer support
function with varying degrees of success and failure. Several factors
can be used to determine whether or not an outsourcing arrangement
will work for a specific company X attempting to outsource function Y.
Are you looking for literature that discusses this or more of a
personal experience that someone has had?

Also, keep in mind that your perception of how "good" a potential
outsource candidate is should have no impact on your decision. The
decision should be made entirely on the bearings of your company
structure, culture, and surrounding industry.

I'd like to help you more specifically with this but I'd like to see
what your expectation is here.

Thanks,
answerguru-ga

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Clarification of Question by ripperie-ga on 14 Jun 2004 09:38 PDT

i suppose i'm looking for the answer, in terms of someone that has had
success or knows of a success story in this area.

my hesitation is that on the size of the operation we're initially
examining ( i.e. 2/3 devs and 2/3 tech support) the management
overhead will cancel all the gains from reduced cost of labour.

this ruled out india and china as options, and even the philippines.
however, there are a number of eastern block countries, romania,
latvia and bulgaria that are 4 hours flight away with a large educated
workforce, with decent enough command of english (younger generation).

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Request for Question Clarification by answerguru-ga on 14 Jun 2004 21:10 PDT

I can't say that I have had personal outsourcing experience in the
part of the world you see mto be interested in, however, would it be
sufficient to answer by finding success stories of companies that are
available for online reading? I believe this may help you with both
strategic and operational decisions if and when you decide to move
onward with this endeavour.

answerguru-ga

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Clarification of Question by ripperie-ga on 16 Jun 2004 04:55 PDT

i suppose there are a number of references for coca cola or HP moving
to eastern europe. if there are any case studies or documentation of
companies that have setup a small operation 4-10 employees, these
would be of most use.

As far as I know, there are several companies that provide call centre
services in Latvia, two of them being Runway (http://www.runway.lv)
and Transcom Worldwide Latvia (http://www.transcom-worldwide.com).
Perhaps they can tell you about the approximate costs involved in such
a venture.
I suspect that there could be significant differences in creating a
call centre in a Baltic state or another Eastern European country
populated by Slavic people - it is extremely hard for a Slav to get
rid of Slavic accent when speaking English, however, it is rather easy
for Latvians or Lithuanians, whose language is much more similiar to
English. Estonians are somewhere between those two, their language is
related to Finnish.
However, the average salary in Latvia and Lithuania is higher than in
Romania or Bulgaria. Also an important factor might be
telecommunication costs, which, as to my knowledge, from the 10 new
Eastern European EU member countries are the highest in Latvia and
lowest in Estonia.
The Baltic states also have a much better educated workforce
technically - there is a larger percentage of IT students and students
of technical sciences in the Baltic states than in the rest of Eastern
Europe, especially regarding software development - the Baltic states
export more software than they import.
If you are unsure about the technical knowledge of network engineers
in Eastern Europe, you could take me as an example - I am a network
engineer in Latvia, I have a Master of Business Administration from
the University of Latvia, I am a Cisco Certified Associate, Cisco
Certified Academy Instructor and I am currently studying to become a
Microsoft Certified Professional; and you can somewhat see my English
skills from this comment. Such a knowledge level is pretty typical for
Latvia, most network engineers I know are even better qualified and
more knowledgeable than me.

Would you like to outsource your function to Sri Lanka? You will be
surprised about the quality labour and the cost.

Greetings, ripperie!

I'd like to offer you a couple of morsels of food for thought.

<< with decent enough command of english >>
A quality measurement of this type is very ambiguous. I've had to try
to get tech support from several different companies and been routed
to 3rd-world call centers. While the "tech" could certainly speak
English, I wouldn't have called it a "decent enough command of
English" -- I usually got someone who was asking scripted questions
and giving me "answers" provided by a knowledgebase; if that didn't
work, they had no clue how to help me. Furthermore, I will no longer
pay for services by ANY company that treats its customers to this sort
of inferior customer support.

I'm far from the only one who feels this way. There is a growing
public aversion to exported call centers, and the cost to your company
in terms of goodwill and lost business from unhappy customers could be
far more than you would save by exporting your call center functions.
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/popups/lou.dobbs.tonight/exporting.america/content1.html
Lou Dobbs' running feature "Exporting America"
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight

Hey Ripperie - I work for a large call center company in the US who
has offices all over the world including overseas. Rest assured that
companies are going overseas because of the great cost savings. like
the other responders I do think that some locations are problematic
and you have to know WHY you want to go before you choose WHERE you
want to go. We have foundour best success in managing customers who
have technical positions like yours (seems like) in the Phillipines
and in Panama.

If you want to talk on the phone, I'd be happy to help you...