Outsourcing of technical jobs is the newest flavor of the past few years and the main course in the years to follow. I do understand the benefit of outsourcing certain jobs to vendors whether they are abroad or at home. I can see the benefit this has for cost saving as well as working in the global market. However, just as the dot com bubble burst I see this coming as well.
Not only has Sprint started taking the position of taking jobs from call center agents and transitioning them but skilled technical labor as well. I have had the unfortunate experience of working with some of the “technical labor” from our outsource vendor IBM.
My first impressions, which I still have, are… you have got to be kidding me!
This ugly ***** of project I’m working now is going out the door to production as the first “new” call center in Winterhaven Florida. Then slowly all call centers currently running will be switched over with new call centers overseas due to come up during the summer.
Put simply, the one thing I like most about the new call center architecture is how stable and reliable that it is. Um, not.
Why is it not stable or reliable? IBM has their collective heads up their arse and will not listen to us until they try it themselves, find out that it doesn’t work, get Sprint and IBM executives breathing down their back, to which they finally engage us. Hell, the product is something that we have already implemented, know how to do, and know where the problems are going to be before we even started building it. They paid little to no attention to our recommendations. The ones they did listen to simply had the headers and footers changed from “Sprint” to “IBM”, as well as the authors of course, and republished the design documents. To which I have to continually ask “what are we paying these yahoo’s for?
They are slow, unresponsive, and purely ignorant on how to design, build, test, integrate, and deploy a call center environment. Then we have the delight of informing them what they are doing wrong and how to correct it. After all it will still be a representation of Sprint and PCS regardless of IBM running the centers and telephony network.
Since last Monday there are 35 “highly” skilled managers, directors, and executives currently in the call center to get it turned up. The Winterhaven call center was turned up a few years ago by a friend of mine. Notice I said “a” friend of mine. One person…
He is currently on site now with the other 35 “highly skilled” individuals and as usual pay no attention to what he’s telling them.
This thing floats about like a rock. They have no implementation plan, no method of procedure document, nothing about environment control, and are trying to build the production switch different than how it was built in the test lab. Other subsystems have also been built different from the test environment. On several conference calls over the week they continue to question why the system does not perform at least to the best suck level that the test environment does. Are they serious? Hello, McFly, you’re not deploying the same thing that you tested on.
Now after a 65 hour regular work week I have the fun of being here over the weekend on another snipe hunt.
Did I forget to mention happy mother’s day? Yeah, this is setting well with the wife.
To all you people who have a Sprint PCS phone and need help through customer service. It’s about to get a lot worse. If your call gets dropped, routed to the wrong agent group, put on hold indefinitely, or hits the agent with none of your account information. Don’t fear, it’s working as designed. Tell yourself that there is no problem and then smile with pride as Sprint has once again offered a better, more stable product that enhances the “customer experience”.
A big joke is what it is. The only problem is I have yet to find the punch line…
I find myself wanting to throw things at the TV when the infamous IBM, “we integrate on demand” commercials come on. Just a reminder that good advertising means crap when the rubber hits the road.
As a Sprint employee, at least the last time I checked, and a PCS customer, I am ashamed at what pile of dung has just been pushed out the door.
Winterhaven starts taking live traffic on the 11th…
