3 outsource companies. 3 failures.

http://www.uselessfreeadvice.com/2007/11/14/why-bother-outsourcing-to-india/

Your post does give another view than what I just got in The Four Hour Workweek. It is hard to give specific instructions when you can’t communicate. I may still have to try a small project to judge for myself; but my expectations will now be open rather than hopeful.

I’ve had a nice experience working with American and British customers and have found that, almost always, the first month is the tough period with the employees here not sure what to do, and client not sure that he made a good decision. Relationships that moved into the second month generally flourished for atleast 6 months or more. Brickwork (and many of the other outsourcing firms in India) has different sets of employees with different educational qualifications and industry experience, that cater to different categories of client industries. In general, work that was more challenging or “high-end” that involved finacial analysis, or strategic studies was the one where clients were most satisfied. While they maintained that the professionalism of US employees was better than ours, it always came at a much higher cost than what they were charged from us. I think Brickwork and other such 150 employee strong outsourcing firms work best for small to mid-sized boutique consultancy firms in the US/UK/Australia which need smart people but generally find it tough to attract local talent because of their size or pay constraints.
All said and done, at a ground level, this market is still in its infancy, irrespective of what Thomas Friedman says, and it’s still couple of years away from achieving a satisfactory performance level. Hope you use some outsourcing firm’s services in the future and hope you won’t be dissapointed the next time

Your experience matches mine EXACTLY.

I am writing this email 50 minutes AFTER a scheduled call with Brickwork that never arrived. I have scheduled several calls with them - none of which ever arrived.

I spoke to them about layout of a book. No quotes were given. They asked for some sample pages which they were going to lay out and they never responded.

I could go on about the number of times I emailed Vivek and others practically begging for things to get done. And I’ve tried SEVERAL times over the last 5 months to do business with them.

Perhaps they are too big, perhaps they are too busy. Bottom line is I wouldn’t deal with them and certainly would suggest that others avoid them too.

I did in fact move forward with the NR lifestyle, and a personal assistant. I just didn’t use an Indian firm. Checkout my follow up post here:

http://www.oneblogtoomany.com/2007/07/24/why-outsourcing-to-india-is-a-bad-idea/

Of course BrickWorks only do the work up to the standard needed. And answering e-=mails once a week is the point.

More than 2 thirds of the world speak English, badly perhaps, but the advantage you have is you understand them, even if that takes some effort.

Books and systems like The four hour work week do work when you go for it.

I remember seeing a video of an Australian entrepreneur once who said that part of becomming succesful was accepting that others would only do your work 80% as well as you could, but you can’t do everything.

My experience of outsourcing to off shore companies was initially poor. The firms involved couldn’t speak English properly, the spelling was awful. They were hours off our work day timing.

They were ridiculously cheap for what my Pound can buy here in the UK
but that showed in what they laughingly called their coustomer relationships and were so nationalistic you’d think the only country in the world was theirs.

For that reason I moved all of my virtual assistant work from the USA to India and Eastern Europe. Now everything is excellent and I am old fashioned work practices free.

Smiles
JonC

Thanks for your comment, but I have to respectfully disagree with you. Let me share with you an example of the point I’m about the make.

Today I called Gieco to get my car insurance renewed. I call their toll free number and of course go through a phone tree that no doubt saves them time, but is painfully slow to me. They could have just sent along an extension to dial to put me into the right queue, but chose to be lazy and therefore have poor customer service. I did renew through them this time because they are a lower rate than other companies. But because of the way they treat their customer service I feel no loyalty to stay with them, so when I find someone as much as $1 lower, I’ll switch.

My point is that just because some big companies do something doesn’t make it a good idea. My friend Jim always used Dell computers, until he had a problem and called them. After a couple hours with someone he could barley understand, it was easy to get him to switch to a Mac.

I can’t say this is a bad idea for everyone. But I will say that I have not personally seen the work ethic from Indian companies that I require from key employees. This is just my personal experience.

As for who has the accent, my feeling on that is simple; the customer is the one without the accent. The fact that some people haven’t excepted that yet is exactly the difference between us.