The Ethics of Outsourcing Customer Service Internationally

The Ethics of Outsourcing Customer Service Internationally

Over the last few decades, companies have been outsourcing much of their labor to countries where labor costs are not nearly as costly as in the United States. A more recent development has been the outsourcing of customer service to nations where English is not a first language. The frustrations associated with this outsourcing have become an almost typical encounter when dealing with customer service. This outsourcing to non-native English speaking nations creates a multitude of ethical dilemmas, the most prominent being: creating a bad image for the business entity that the customer service is representing, creating customer service that leaves much to be desired, and outsourcing also takes jobs from Americans going through a severe economic crisis.

As Bruce Weinstein outlines in his article,” The Ethics of Outsourcing Customer Service,” outsourcing creates nothing but negative word of mouth (Weinstein). By saying this, Weinstein means that a company will get bad publicity based on the support it provides to its customers. Much in the same fashion the way that originally, McDonalds evaluated the appeal of the store was directly proportional to the cleanliness of the bathroom. It is extremely difficult to repair a company's image after it has been tarnished. A person put in the position of making such large scale decisions is not always looking at the long term goals, but is too often consumed with the short term profits. Therefore, when it is decided to outsource customer service, it does the company as a whole, and anyone working for it thereafter, a disservice. Once a company receives the notoriety of outsourcing customer service to an area where an average person's accent renders much of the English language incoherent to someone who is not accustomed to the accent, removing that image becomes very difficult. I have experienced such poor customer service when dealing with Comcast....