I've been travelling with my family up in French speaking Canada so, of course, customer service and communication are in the forefront of my mind.  For those of you who look North and see a mirror, let me assure you that in the central right hand part of Canada you'll get a chance to practice your French.  Your 18th century French, but still.  So, to summarize, I got on an airline with a buncha kids AND landed in a country where the primary language and culture is French.

Communication

Fewer than 20% of the people I've needed to deal with have spoken no English, but at least another 40% have had very limited English skills.  How do I know they aren't just 'pretending' to speak only French?  Well, I have approximately 100 words of guide-book French memorized and that is usually enough to drive any Gallic waiter in a haughty two star Paris 'straunt into instant perfect English.  I assume that the same holds true in Canada.

The problem here is that I am dealing with people in the service industry: hotels, full-service gas stations (remember those?), bakeries, etc.

It's as if a high tech company took their customer service and outsourced it to a country where English was a second language.  Like, say, Chennai or Bangalore.

Startling Realization

It's would be pretty easy to get an executive at HP or GE to reconsider offshoring customer service by taking them to old Quebec City, pointing at a shop and telling them to get directions to the Funicular.  Then ask them to imagine my mother trying to figure out how to unjam her inkjet with the help of Prashant in a noisy call center.

But We Do It Too

We recently released the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer and one of our beta members dropped a mention into the excellent Y!Store Forums.  As you might imagine, a LOT of people showed up to try the tool and some of them had some interesting problems that we just hadn't found in testing.

Instead of having our techie guys hop on and answer the questions in gruesome and excruciating detail, I made them explain and show me what was going on so that I could explain in a useful fashion.

Free Customer Service Isn't

It costs money to have your offshore guy deliver the service, and in the short/medium term it is probably cheaper than having someone in a square state deliver the same service.  And I am sure that some bright spark MBA can come up with a chart showing that in the end the lower customer retention actually drives profits.

But, frankly, baloney.

It's not free to spend $1.25 to not solve a problem for a consumer rather than $4.50 to actually solve it.  And then lose a customer. I could probably prove the opposite in a spreadsheet too (after all, I have gotten VC money) but anyone in the real world knows it is false as can be.

Results Count

My mom will never buy another HP Inkjet printer again, she's so scarred from that call.  Now, she's a bit long in the tooth and all, but I figure that is 8 printers that HP won't sell.  Plus when we went to get her a new laptop there were no HP products in the mix.  Ooops.

Her wireless printer adaptor died (power surge) and she went and got a new one.  (My mom is not a techie, but she can usually follow directions - clearely a trait that skipped a generation!)  Of course it did NOT work out of the box so she had to call customer service  - this time she got someone in Manila.  Same weak English.  But well trained - he carefully walked her through each step, and when he couldn't fix it (her WAP was set to secure) he passed her to somebody in ... Russia.  They quickly determined the fix and walked her through it.  In the end it took 75 minutes, but all offshore time.  She is now a huge fan of ... Cisco.

The Bottom Line

You can temporarily boost the bottom line by not providing "free" customer service, but in the end it'll simply cost you money.  My simple suggestions, all of which require upfront investment but can be executed with the losest cost resources availabe:

• Recognize that free customer service can be a cost or a profit center
• Training is critical
• Documentation is necessary
• Set customer expectations up front, especially for complex products

It's really not rocket science.