Outsourced Call Centers Return, To U.S. Homes
by Carolyn Beeler, National Public Radio
August 25, 2010
Maureen Quigley-Hogan is the next generation of call center worker. Wearing pink slippers and sitting at her desk in her home office in Virginia, she takes a call from a woman in New Jersey who has a question about her credit card bill.
Quigley-Hogan was unemployed for 10 years because she couldn’t hold down a traditional job, she says. She has rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, a disease that causes severe fatigue.
“It was hard to get to a job,” Quigley-Hogan says. “The idea of going through a regular schedule of getting up and getting ready for work, I would be exhausted.”
She worked in customer service for more than 20 years, so two years ago, she was thrilled to land this job where she can work from home.
Rethinking Overseas Outsourcing
For years, Americans have had their phone calls about credit card bills and broken cell phones handled by people in the Philippines or India. But American firms are starting to bring call centers back to the U.S. — and this time around, they are hiring more people to work in their own homes.
Ten years ago, it made a lot of sense to outsource these jobs overseas. But that’s changing. Increasingly, companies that want to outsource their customer service jobs are happy with these domestic arrangements.
High inflation and double-digit annual raises in some sectors are pushing up the cost of labor in India. At the same time wages in the U.S. are falling and companies are rethinking the trade-offs associated with outsourcing.
I’m not sure whether it’s really a good thing when these kinds of pieces seems (or actually DO) write themselves.
and be sure not to miss:
Apu explains why he is leaving Springfield to return to his home to India
India, once considered as the preferred destination by many US companies to get their jobs done might not be a considered a hotspot by them anymore, courtesy various protectionist moves in the US like pressurising local firms to stop outsourcing of jobs overseas, ending tax breaks for firms that sent jobs abroad, encouraging local hiring etc…
It’s getting where you can’t cut’n’paste these stories fast enough
