Top 10 Outsourcing Horror Stories – How you Can Avoid Them
Offshore outsourcing has become a game changer for many small business owners in the United States and other locations in the West.
In spite of that, there have been reports of many failures in the outsourcing world and we’re going to summarize a few of them so we can help you make better decisions when the time comes to find an outsourcing company to delegate your tasks.
Many of these anecdotes are drawn from small business owners and from outsourcing employees themselves! – Those most affected by nefarious offshoring practices and this is what we want to get rid of it offshore business processes are to succeed and to improve in the coming years.
If you’re going to improve your backend tasks, there needs to be a trade off of higher returns. This is supposedly one of the many promises of business process outsourcing. But what happens when things go wrong?
1. The call center agent has a weird accent!
This is probably the number 1 peeve of many Westerners. If the agent has a weird accent and can’t be understood on the line? It’s hard to communicate. And if a certain company in concern is outsourcing to India? The customer has no other choice! Having a strange accent, politically incorrect as it may sound causes a breakdown in communication that is not ideal for the customer experience.
2. The server kept crashing – remote employees could not catch up to airline tickets needs
Some things are gonna go wrong in business. That’s common What happens is that when things go wrong and the people on the other continent are not attending to them properly! This is going to lose the client – YOU millions or more if you don’t get things taken care of!
Of course horror outsourcing stories like these are often caused by miscommunication again. This is when things have a glitch and your Offshore IT won’t even lift a finger to make changes when the need comes.
3. My remote employee went AWOL!
Of course we’ve tried this. Some of us here have hired freelancers and this is what happens when you hire someone who has his own agenda. Imagine hiring a web developer and he half bakes his work without completing it? Worse he delegates all his tasks to the content writer and graphic designer!
This is common if you choose a form of outsourcing which has no accountability and no transparency.
4. My agents laundered my money
In 2020 a recent scam involving call center agents and bitcoin was the heat of the outsourcing world in the Philippines. This happens when there is no transparency, no data security and most of all when the client could not monitor the specifics of key accounts and transactions.
This is call center outsourcing at it’s worst and it can be prevented only if you work with an outsourcing provider who has transparency.
5. My sales went down! I had to quit and resort to downsizing
This is pretty common in call centers with a very high attrition rate. If your sales suddenly go down and your outsourcing partner can no longer help you, you have no choice but to call it quits right? This is the case if you’ve chosen an arrangement that should have led to cost savings but instead has cost you more.
6. I interviewed a really good job candidate! And I got a lousy replacement instead!
This is pretty common in outsourcing companies where there is no communication or transparency. While attrition can happen in the on boarding phase, it’s not hard for a decent management to inform you, the client of the happenings on the ground. If a remote employee wants to leave?
Fine they should tell you about it. No one should be kept in the dark about any major changes to onboarding especially when you’re just preparing to work with this company.
7. The middle line managers kept saying I could not keep in touch with my employees
Have you ever had an immediate QA or concern and then someone from the “management” just takes over and tries to talk you down? Would you have wanted to talk to your employees at a given time period say in Christmas or maybe in Thanksgiving and give them praise, bonuses, or maybe just an extra boost of motivation from the highest ups?
Outsourcing is meant to allow you some space to work without having to oversee the minutia of your staff, but if it means they just ignore you when you have VALID COMPLAINTS, this means the call center is not at all reliable.
8. I called and they told me to check back in 10 days
If you’ve ever had problems with a transaction going through? Maybe you need help from your web developers but they keep telling you to check back again? This is a sign that there is something fishy or maybe your programmers have jumped ship and they’re having trouble finding a replacement.
Offshore outsourcing just like managing a company locally has it’s own hiccups, but you must be made aware of something especially if your money is at stake. No one should have to stay in the run around just because you’re working with a remote team who does not care about your bottom line.
9. I hired an outsourcing company to write code for me! And they patented it and said I had no rights to the same code!
This is one underhanded tactic that happens in IT Outsourcing companies which are unreliable. If you intend to write code and keep the patents and the copyrights to yourself, you should lay that down beforehand.
If they do, but still hijack your code, then that is unethical and this outsourcing company is only out there to make quick dollars without consideration for your time or intellectual property.
10. I wanted to call my remote employees but they KEPT CHANGING SHIFTS – WHY?
If your remote employees are unavailable when you need them, then you may have to hire replacements or find more committed people. Sometimes though it may be because you’re trying to outsource your tasks to a company who has rotating clients. And you’re just one of the clients.
So often, this kind of mess up happens in freelance. But it can also take place in call centers where the management just treats people like numbers and they push them to other places and stall other clients while satisfying others.
It’s probably because of kickbacks and corruption why they have to rotate staff anyway. That can be an exception of you’re outsourcing to a digital marketing company for example and their employees have rotating schedules?
It cannot be the norm if you’re trying to achieve something and manifest more sales.
Here are the Core Disadvantages if you choose the Wrong Outsourcing Company
How iSuporta can Help
We’ve worked with some of the best eCommerce companies and some of the most diverse industries in the West.
The way we work is that we allow you to lay down your terms and your preferences of managing your remote employees. If there are limitations in terms of our offerings of software and hardware? We acknowledge them. If there are ways to improve our infrastructure? We talk about it with our clients.
This is why Outsourcing can be taken to the Next Gen in Remote Staffing.
Managed Operations is our brand and we take the best in providing office space and infrastructure which traditional outsourcing services offer and we give our clients a chance to dictate the pace and scope of our employee’s work thus ensuring quality and higher chances of returns.