Onshoring a trend in Asia too

Remember when offshoring contact centers was all the rage? Well, most of the time the rage turned out to be from callers as customer satisfaction indexes corresponded to the cheaper hourly rate of the agent.

The technology has been around many years to seamlessly (except the heavy foreign accents) establish an offshore contact center, but the way companies were taking that route in droves for the sake of the bottom line sort of made it an abuse of the technology. Companies started losing customers for the reason that their service representatives couldn’t really provide any service, or sometimes had difficulty understanding callers (and vice versa). That period of time was the Dark Ages of Customer Service.

Finally some company executives saw the light and started reversing the offshoring trend which was coined “onshoring.” Big corporations like Dell, HP, Monster.com, and AT&T started relocating their centers in India, the Phillippines, Latin America, and elsewhere, back to the United States. Gone are the days when callers would hear “MaryJo” with a heavy Indian accent handle calls. Onshoring proved to be a good move not only in customer service, but also general goodwill as these companies helped create domestic jobs.

And it turns out that onshoring is a trend in Asia, too — at least for Taiwanese companies like Canon Taiwan and BenQ Corp.:

Canon Taiwan has seen a rise in the level of customer satisfaction since it relocated customer service to Taiwan from Hong Kong in September last year, Su said.

This also helped the Japanese company sell more high-end cameras in Taiwan last year, Su noted.

BenQ Corp., a Taiwanese consumer electronics maker, also saw greater levels of customer satisfaction after relocating their customer service line from China to Taiwan, the report said.

Cultural difference is a major factor that hurts customer satisfaction when a company outsources its service calls from Taiwan to China, said Jerry Peng, the general manager of BenQ’s customer service in Taiwan.

The lesson? In order to service your customers, you want your agents to have similar backgrounds as the callers!

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Tagged as: china, outsource, taiwan