There was an interesting story on NBC Nightly News tonight about some companies who have decided to end outsourcing practices and have started to hire people here in the U.S. again. Even though these outsourcing deals were saving them money, customer complaints influenced them to bring their customer service and support business back home again.

As a consumer, I surely can relate to this. One of the major reasons I dumped my TracFone service a couple of years back was the customer service. If I’m not mistaken, TracFone is not a U.S. company so it was not outsourcing that was the main cause of the problem but since I had to deal with customer service personnel on telephone lines with terrible sound quality and talk to customer service people that did not speak very good English and seemed adept only at apologizing profusely and not solving my problems, I dumped the service.

The kind of problems I ran into with TracFone are exactly the kinds of problems consumers are encountering when dealing with these overseas call centers that have been hired by U.S. companies to provide customer service and support.

The last thing I want when I call a company for help or support with their product or service is someone on the other end of the line who I can barely understand. All I want to do when I get into these situations is hang up and not deal with it. It’s so frustrating to be trying to solve some kind of problem and not be able to communicate effectively with the person that is supposed to be helping you.

Now some companies are starting to respond to customer complaints about the poor service being provided by these overseas organizations that are hiring themselves out to take over customer service and support for U.S. companies. Some consumers were so fed up that they were making recordings of their bad customer support telephone conversations and posting them on popular video sharing sites like YouTube. Nothing like a little bad publicity to get the attention of a big company!

Let’s hope this is a trend that really gets some traction and we see more customer support jobs coming back to the U.S. As a consumer, this would go a long way towards rebuilding my confidence in customer service in this country.

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Tags: Call Centers, Customer Service, Outsourcing, Telephone