Orwellian Tech Support 853
alteran writes "Here's a very well-written piece on what goes on inside a tech-support call center. Makes working for Initech seem good. Sorry about the forced ad-viewing - it only last about 10 seconds, and the article is worth it."
Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:1, Informative)
We're not here to help fix your computer. We just want to get you off the phone. A tech-support slave tells his hellish tale.
Editor's note: All names have been changed.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Kyle Killen
Feb. 23, 2004 | Class officially started three hours ago, but our instructor has not yet arrived. This is not uncommon. By now many of my classmates have begun to bring cards, magazines and DVDs to pass the time. "The Matrix" is playing on someone's laptop and has attracted a small crowd in the back of the room. The fact that we're being paid largely to sit around and entertain ourselves has been the source of lots of jokes and smiles, but in the back of our minds we can't help but be concerned.
Several people confess that they've never done more with a computer than check their e-mail. Others admit they haven't even gotten that far. An impromptu contest develops to see exactly who knows the least. There are lots of contenders. I'm listening to them battle for the crown of incompetence as I'm dealt a new hand of cards when a frightening thought occurs to me. Our clueless bunch is now part of the technical-support staff for one of the world's top three computer manufacturers, and in seven days we're going to be taking your calls.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Ken is standing in the aisle, tethered to his cube by the spiraled umbilical of his headset, holding an unlit cigarette, and yelling. Ken is always yelling, and that's why we love him. Lots of us jot down Ken's more memorable tirades and compare notes on our breaks. Now, standing near my cube, screaming in the urgent and gravelly tones of a mid-40s chain smoker trapped in a non-smoking building, Ken tells a customer, "Quit whining and go get a damn screwdriver. I don't have time for this bullshit."
None of us is sure how he gets away with it, especially considering that Ken saves his real anger for dealing with management. His conversations with the higher-ups all end with Ken screaming, "This is bullshit! Total bullshit!" and hanging up.
We all understand why Ken is angry. We've been tech-support representatives for six weeks and already a third of our training class has left. A new crop of techs hit the floor last week, and two of them are already gone. It might be tempting to believe that the customers are driving the techs away, that they just can't take the stress of dealing with endless complaints and callers driven to near madness by interminable holds. But the callers just want answers. Ken, and those of us who are left, are angry because for the most part we don't have them.
When we pick up the phone we're lying. We don't really work for the company we say we work for. Because of the expense of housing and running a technical support operation, many computer manufacturers choose to outsource the work. We work for one such outsourcer, though you'd never know it just to talk to us. To the customer on the other end of the line the distinction, while important, is invisible.
Outsourcers are paid by the computer manufacturer based on the number of calls they handle. The more calls we take, the more the outsourcer is paid. So naturally everything that happens in this vast carpeted warehouse of cubicles is done with an eye toward speed. Our managers stress something called "average call time," which is simply the average amount of time a tech spends on each call. They want us to be under 12 minutes. Our phones monitor our ability to reach this magic number as well as the total number of calls we take, the number of times we ask for help, how much time we take between calls, even the amount of time we spend in the restroom. In short, your phone is always watching you.
Twelve minutes can sometimes be difficult even if you know what you're doing. It is impossible if you don't have a clue. The stress of always being on the clock without really knowing how to do your job has already claimed a third of my classmates, and from the looks of the bulging vei
Yeah... (Score:3, Informative)
Dell's support line was like this when I called them last summer... Hopefully now that Dell is moving call centers back home again, better service is just around the corner.
2 cents (Score:5, Informative)
What's funny is... (Score:3, Informative)
I highly suspect this is a bogus/fluff article: you know, an amaglamation of a bunch of interviews and war stories about the worst call center conditions imaginable.
depends on the company (Score:4, Informative)
Why is this news?
Yeah, mod it flamebait, but you thought the same thing.
Some companies give bad tech support. News at 11.
Mozilla Ad-blocking (Score:4, Informative)
Adblock cache.ultramercial.com/*
Adblock salon.com/Creatives/*
That flags the cookie you've seen the ad, and next time you get a nice clean page that says click here to continue.
Also on Salon, the ads are pathed to
Re:Oversea tech support (Score:5, Informative)
"The reason they got so much hell from corporate customers is that they have dedicated IT professionals who've already done all the testing and can't afford two hours on the phone to get some replacement hardware sent out. The IT dept will simply switch to a new vendor if that kind of crap persists."
Actually, larger firms can get a deal with Dell where an in-house tech can order parts under warranty on a website. I would go nuts if my company didn't have that option.
-Jeff
Re:Similar to my experiences... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:2 cents (Score:5, Informative)
Heehee. I worked over two years in European tech support - based in Ireland - for one of the big three (at that time), and it was all true! One difference - in my section, we had laptops, so using laplink and a serial cable we could install games on our machines. Got rid of the frustration. But not the big brother attitude of the omnipresent phone stats and supervisors...
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
A punter now means a consumer, but previously meant gambler, especially horse racing.
My days as a tech junkie (Score:5, Informative)
Others just told customers the printer was defective and needed to be replaced and sent them a new one. (Now you know why it's so easy to get that printer replaced!)
And for the printers that really needed to be replaced, that really had major defects, it was a big no-no to even mention that this might be a common problems.
You see, tech support is all about image. The company doesn't want to give good tech support. It just wants the customers to not think badly about it.
P.S.: To be fair, the TS was nowhere near as bad as described in the article, but I was only in the (comparitively) highly-trained laser printer dept. The ink-jets were shipped out to India a LONG time ago.
Punter (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Orwellian? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps it was this quote that made the submitter think of "1984":
Our phones monitor our ability to reach this magic number as well as the total number of calls we take, the number of times we ask for help, how much time we take between calls, even the amount of time we spend in the restroom. In short, your phone is always watching you.
Re:Not all that enlightening (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
Originally a term for a person who went to racecourses and put bets on nags (horses) in the hope they might come in and win and save their individual financial bacon, the term is now, in Britain, extended to anyone who makes a bet on anything, whatever - such as whether their PCs will work. A punter in Britain is not, as one of our readers pointed out applies in his country, a Canadian kind of boat.
A reckless, novelty seeking consumer, perhaps?
Hear, of course, it's just someone who punts (kicks) their problem over to someone else.
A good experience with Dell... (Score:4, Informative)
The whole call only took about 5 minutes, and now my laptop is happy again. Good times.
The joys of being a formatter... (Score:3, Informative)
The second mantra... (Score:2, Informative)
Having recently been outsourced (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike the article, we do currently actually fix the problems, but guess what. Now 60% of fixes have to be within 24 hours, so what do you do with troublesome customers? Ticket goes on "waiting for customer" immediately, call them back at lunchtime, three calls and it gets closed. The metrics look good.
That Apache upgrade? Not part of baseline break/fix. Now costs you money and 3 days of my time (how much per hour?) as we update the OS, apache rev, modules. Oh, it broke your application? But you approved the change managment and we don't support homegrown applications.
Grid computing. Yum. $100/month/machine for supporting workstations becomes $1,000/month/machine as the desktops are migrated to *clustered* servers in the machine room. And you thought it was such a good idea before the outsourcing, at least they aren't on your budget, I wonder is it corporate who're taking the financial hit as the numbers of supported servers rockets?
Out of hours support? I'm off at 5 mate. Hourly rates double in the evening and double again at the weekend. And they start in 3 digits. What? You want a production system upgraded at the weekend? Oh you need a DBA and Financials administrator as well? And that 100Gb restore which is taking 10 hours? You get billed for every second which is out of baseline hours.
Re:Yeah... (Score:3, Informative)
Hopefully this isn't your personal computer we're talking about. One of the cool things that happen when you actually read the news articles is you learn what the story is about. Tech Support for Dell is moving away from India for Corporate/Enterprise clients only. Consumers still go to Banaglore.
This is not Great Britian (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Violation of copyright laws (Score:1, Informative)
ok gotta rat em out, I used to work for this place (Score:5, Informative)
just to give my fellow slashdotters an idea of what working for this company is like:
they employ over 5,000 of the worst possbile computer illiterates I've ever seen. most have never even seen the inside of a computer. they specificly say during interview "We do not prefer experience or certifications. we will give any one with computer knowledge a job but prefer that *we* train you"
they pay $11/hr WHILE logged into the phone, minimum wage when not logged in (which btw will be most of the time).
security is soo tight there all employees are run through a metal detector coming AND going from the complex (would say building but there are 6 of them). I asked once why they did this they responded "to protect the employees from the employees" referring to a couple times people started shooting guns in the call center.
This company is evil incarnate. the place is a total sweat shop. 3-400,000 sq ft per building of cubicles. it's soo disorienting navigating the cubicle farm you have to go by the signs posted.
Oh and everything the article said about the place is true. yes they are one of the largest support providers, they do compaq, HP and IBM, plus bellsouth/comcast, directv, and a bunch of others. All they care about is getting you off the phone in 12 minutes (thats what the dead giveaway was, totall company policy, if you spend 15 minutes you have 3 supervisors breathing down your neck). they will even go so far as you find a reason to manually disconnect @ 13 minutes telling you to call back again.
ATTN Florida Slashdotters: Can someone back me up on this place, I know someone else has to have worked there. I can't possibly describe how bad this place really is since I only worked there 4 days, but man it did ring some bells.
Oh btw, here's the whois info:
Registrant:
TAG (TAG6-DOM)
7562 Southgate Blvd
NORTH LAUDERDALE, FL 33068
US
Domain Name: TAG2.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Nunez, Juan (JN8854) jnunez@TAG2.COM
TAG
7562 SOUTHGATE BLVD
N LAUDERDALE, FL 33068-1362
US
(954) 724-6745 fax: (954) 726-0015
Record expires on 08-May-2008.
Record created on 07-May-1996.
Database last updated on 23-Feb-2004 12:07:40 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
CMTU.MT.NS.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET 12.127.16.69
CBRU.BR.NS.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET 199.191.128.105
Re:Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:1, Informative)
Latin Thamesis, truncated to Thames by some people and Isis by the others.
Funny this. Almost the same happened to me. (Score:4, Informative)
The LCD was harder as I had to convince the staff that they had said any pixel problems was enough to get it changed and any pixel problem includes an always on red sub pixel. But got it changed.
Yet almost all people I meet say that they prefer to buy name brands because of the warranty and phone support. Both are crap but it probably gives them a nice fuzzy feeling.
I buy from shops and although I have needed it so far for computers it is far easier to demand to see the manager in person then it is over a phone line.
So I got exactly one question for you. Was this the last time you bought from this company or did you vote with your dollars and say "Yes sir thank you sir can you waste my time again SIR!"
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up?
WRONG Since people keep buying from companies with lousy support these companies have no incentive to improve tech support. The problem isn't the techs the problem is the customers who keep accepting this crap.
Re:Orwellian? (Score:3, Informative)
On a higher level, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four exaggerated the effects of loss of privacy to send a warning, and the message has taken root. The author of this piece likewise wishes to send a message about the foolishness of paying for technical support based on the number of calls handled per day, without any quality metric. I hope the necessary people read this story.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Not our call center (Score:2, Informative)
When you call us you're talking to a bunch of Linux geeks that actually know what we're doing. Whether it's upgrading your server's kernel or fixing Apache issues, we do it all.
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
The term punt comes from American football, where one kicks, or "punts" the ball downfield when deliberately handing control of the ball to the other side, thus making the opposing team have more ground to make up toward the goal.
Such deliberate exchanges of ball control are part of the rules of American football, so punting is a stategic choice.
In colloquial usage to punt means either to do something essentially random and see what happens, or to "kick" the problem to someone else, leading to the common American phrase, "When in doubt, punt."
KFG
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
KFG
Re:Similar to my experiences... (Score:2, Informative)
The place was a meat factory and one of the most wretched places to work. When the phone wasn't monitoring you, this arrogant bastige at the front desk was checking the breakroom every 5 minutes asking what you were doing or your 'Team Leader' was listening in on your calls and critiquing you.
We also had the "Average Call Time" but it was 15 minutes. Stream's answer to keeping the call time down was "Get themto start formatting thier drive and have them call back when they were ready for the next step..." WTF!
Anyway, it's closed now. Has been for about 2 years I suppose. It was definately a learning experience. I learned I would never do helpdesk again. You helpdesk guys and gals are a tough bunch. Kudos to you. I think I'll sit at my desk and put my phone on Night Mode while I fill out my TPS report.
Same experience here (Score:5, Informative)
Amusing but ultimatly... (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, it's average call time. While most of my experiance has to do with ISP support there are still a lot of parallels. Say you get a 30 min call, then a 5 min call, then a 10 min call. Right there your at 15 mins ACT. Not great but if your trying to actually solve problems rather than "punt" or "give" the call away it's a respectable ACT to have. Now how do you know that 15 mins is a respectable call time if it's 3 mins over your 12 min limit? Next point...
Any good call center has peer review and then the big client review. (I don't touch on client review here but suffice to say there are often frantic scrambles down to the "floor" from the boardroom to tell tech X that he better do a good job on this call, time be dammed!) Peer review is typically a weekly thing that every manager has to submit to their "Account Manger" every week. Plug into the call queue and listen though a call. Not the most fun but it really does need to be done to ensure that people have a clue what they are talking about. (This is assuming you as the manager actually have a clue, but I digress.) Many times this job is left to the managers lackys, sometimes called "Team Leads", but the important thing is that it gets done by someone who has a good understanding of what to listen for in a call. You then can use this data with the statistics on call times and such to get a real picture of how a tech is dealing with calls. Only looking at the #'s leads to...
The drive to get as many calls as humanly possable, problem solving be dammed. And yeah, it's there and will be until the clients (The people who outsource their support needs.) realize that paying by call instead of "resolutions" is a truely asinine way of doing things. However, since many companys have yet to realize this you will have call centers gouging at the trough of calls/money. So often what is done by clever managers is to strike a balance of techs who do both, those "turn and burn" calls and those who actually try to fix problems. It is far from a perfect solution as those who don't fix anything tend to leave the customers in a very upset state for those that do actually try and fix things, or even worse the punters manage to make the problem worse before ending the call. But it's a way to actually keep the gravy train running while still being able to keep most of the angry customers from writing scathing letters to the powers that might actually cancel your contract.
I could go on but I think everyone should get the idea by now. Hopefully one of these days the people who outsource their support will get a clue and use that magic word resolution rather than trying to just look at #'s but for right now it's at best a frog in the blender mix of both kinda deal.
Re:You can't get parts from India... (Score:3, Informative)
You can't have it both ways. Either the economy is expanding (net job increase) or it's not (net job decrease or stagnation).
Re:You can't get parts from India... (Score:2, Informative)
The recovery is considered a jobless one. And whether the economy is improving or not, being out of work stinks, and intangible improvements to the economy do not put food on the table or pay the rent.
Maybe. I'm not necessarily saying there is no merit to offshoring, but keep in mind that other countries don't have the worker protections the US does (minimum wage, work hours, etc). Some might be as good or better, but no guarantee.
And it looks like economies would benefit by higher income jobs, but globalization can do some wild stuff to economies, including making economies dependent on the global economy, rather than self sufficient.
Re:Nothing new here... BULL*$@# ! (Score:1, Informative)
You obviously have never called tech support. I refuse, to this day, to call Windows tech support lines for anything. That's because, in the early days of Windows (3.1 to win95) every damned problem came down to re-installing Windows. I hear it's better now but I'm not gonna try it.
Say what you will, I think this entire idiotic non-support tech support model, along with its casual contempt for the customer and the customer's data, was pioneered by Microsoft.
Re:How? (Score:2, Informative)
Support Ed Foster!!! (Score:3, Informative)
AT & T Universal Card: Companies are not only using Indians to do jobs that were done by Americans. Companies are using Indians to further abuse their customers. I talked with one Indian woman at AT & T Universal Credit Card customer support who told me that she had no way to contact anyone but her Indian manager, and that the Indian manager had no way to contact anyone at AT & T. So, there is no way to resolve any legitimate problem. The logic seems to be, "Why should we hire Americans to abuse our customers? We should get Indians to do all the ugly jobs."
ECS (Elitegroup) Motherboards: One of the answers is to call the technical support for a product before you ever buy the product. I wish I had done that before buying and testing 8 L7VTA V1 motherboards from ECS. I found that the ECS technical support line is a recording that says something like, "All of our customer support personnel are busy helping other customers. Please call back at a later time." There is no opportunity to leave a message. If you don't believe me, try it yourself: 510-226-7333 option 4 for technical support. Only one of the 8 motherboards works as advertised, and ECS will do nothing about it; they don't answer email either.
Support Ed Foster: Maybe the only person who is doing anything about this is Ed Foster [gripe2ed.com]. Here are the companies in the GripeLog Hall of Shame [gripe2ed.com]: 1: Dell, 2: Microsoft 3: VeriSign 4: Intuit 5: Symantec 6: Network Associates 7: HP 8: Cisco.
I've personally been abused by Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco, and Intuit. I have no desire to repeat that ugly experience. So, I try to stay away from anything they do. In my experience, they are not companies that sell computer software and hardware, and are sometimes abusive. They are abuse companies that also sell software and hardware. The world of computing would have been a far better place if Bill Gates had had a caring childhood. The world of computing would be a far worse place if we didn't have good leaders like Linus Torvalds.
Re:Violation of copyright laws (Score:1, Informative)
salon.com is incompetent; fuck 'em!
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
Sometimes people just get mixed up over words that sound very similar.
Bunt is derived from butt, to hit lightly. It is possible that it is a portmanteua word with punt, but there is no actual evidence that this is the case.
Punt means to drop a ball from the hands and kick it. It does not carry the explicit meaning of to do so lightly, in fact generally opposite is the case.
These are both also technical terms of sport, and their meanings have been rigidly defined in the rule books for over 100 years.
KFG
exaggerated? unfair description of top vendors? (Score:2, Informative)
Although i hate bad tech support as much as the next guy, i thought the article was over-the-top. it sounds like tech-support stereotyping. the author has been permitted to omit identifying information. I wonder if salon really did due diligence on this piece.
The writer says he works for one of the top three computer manufacturers. Presumably he's talking about PCs. Who would that be? Dell, HP, IBM?
I've dealt with Dell. Sorry, they are simply not nearly that bad. I'd say the same for HP, although they are less competent than Dell. I've dealt with IBM on the server side. They are far better than the writer describes. Some posters seem to think he is talking about Indian tech support. The writer never said that, and all the names are English/American. I have generally found Indian tech support to be really bad, but they haven't been able to authorize replacement parts. That has always been done by usa-based Level 2 support. At the writer's company, they regularly authorize replacements (see "givers" in the article).
An interesting article, I conclude, but not to be taken literally. It is an encapsulation of all that is wrong with tech support. But not a fair representation of Dell, HP, or IBM support. BTW, the Salon website is really dragging today. I've been getting timeouts. The Slashdot Effect strikes again!
They forgot the speech police part of it. (Score:3, Informative)
This made the job just a teensy bit more difficult when a customer is demanding you stop sending them porn popups and you have no way to say it's not coming from us and we have nothing to do with it, because you're not allowed to say no. Instead you have to try and quickly come up with some hippie bullshit that's "phrased positively" like "These popups are used to generate advertising revenue and usually come from the website you're reading, or sometimes from software that has been installed on your computer. We only provide the internet connection so the popups come from other sources." Which always results in a customer going into a screaming rage about how they never had this with AOL and they never installed anything that does this etc.
Oh, the other fun one was that while trying to keep your call under 10 minutes, solving a problem or getting a customer to believe it's someone else's support they need to talk to ("But my computer is fine, it's the internet that's broken!") you have to document all your calls and everything you've done on them in a form which is saved so people can later look up what you did. Most techs heavily skimped on this to save time, which meant whoever had to reference their sheets later when the customer calls in for the 4th time that day screaming about slow downloads has no idea what the problem is or what the last tech tried to do to troubleshoot it.
And yes, I did solve all the problems, even the lady who had a BIOS with bad power management that would cause her HP to shut down anytime the USB ports recieved too much traffic, like when using the USB port on the modem, who had already called HP 4 times recieved a replacement computer twice from best buy, etc. I called her back when I found out the problem by searching on my lunch break and had her reconnect on ethernet. Then I told her to call HP and tell them she wanted a BIOS update (I had her write it down) and here's the technical articles explaining what's going on and why it's their fault.
Yeah my times were crap, barely below the cutoff levels. But after 2 months I tried to stab myself so I'd have an excuse not to go into work, so I decided it was better to quit. Back to job searching again.
Re:I remember when... (Score:2, Informative)
This is all predicted (Score:3, Informative)
You all should read The Electronic Sweatshop by Barbara Garson. Basically, in a company decisions are moved up the hierarchy so that people at low levels can be easily trained, paid less, and easily replaced. In that order. Ideally no training would be required, cutting the employee replacement cost even further. You see this obviously at McDonald's but less obviously in fields like social work, and more slowly in education.
The book itself is mostly conversations with people in jobs of this kind, or anecdotal records of those people. There's very little preaching by the author, if any.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/01 40121455/103-0830543-8955814?v=glance
Ravi
That was so true.. (Score:1, Informative)
Although I didn't work the phones personally, I did have the opportunity to spend a few hours riding tandam with random support people-- they'd plug an extra pair of headphones into their phones and you just sat and listened to the exchanges...
I could NOT believe how horrible these tech support people are. I actually listened to one of them lecture a customer about how having DSL was a "privilege" and they should feel lucky to even be considered for the service-- never mind the fact that this person had stayed home several days in a row and the installer never showed up. Fast calls they were willing to help, but anything that looked like it was going to take more than a couple minutes they blew off.
There was a giant LED "stock ticker" in the room that spewed out statistics.. I don't know exactly what they meant, but I got the impression it was the high-tech equivalent of the big fat dude pounding on the drums in those Trojan slave ships. You could hear the desperation and frustration in the caller's voices.. It was not a happy day for me.
Motivation of outsourcing companies. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Average call answer time (Score:3, Informative)
Call centers and tech support work different here.
First one you rarely see scripting. People get actually trained, usually in house.
As for the unions, its not even a union thing. Employee monitoring tech by law is subject to agreement by the cpmpany's employee council - and they rarely do. So you usually end up with compromises like team based statistics, anonymized user data and such.
Re:Similar to my experiences... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Violation of copyright laws (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, except they get paid for showing the ad, and some of us can't actually see the rest of the article. After going to their "sponsor ad," the link is broken.
Re:Violation of copyright laws (Score:0, Informative)
ADVERTIZING
Most sites like IGN and GameSpy allow you to purchase something called a "subscription" (as in "buying a subscription to Slashdot) that will allow you to bypass those annoying Adverts. If you don't want to pay for access to such sites and don't want to deal with Ads, then the answer is very simple: Don't go there, or find another outlet for the news & info that site provides that doesn't use irritating Ads & pop-ups/pop-unders.
Welcome to the New Internet - it's been here since the 1990's. Get used to it or go to some geek-boy's homebrew gaming website that carries nearly the same info you'll find in IGN, but with cute little animated GIFs of Pikachu all over the place.
Your Choice.
--ScottKin
Re:Is Email support any better? (Score:3, Informative)
So, he'd leave at lunch with a vast majority of the questions "answered", and I'd get slowed up for two reasons: 1) actually answering new questions that came in and 2) re-answering the questions he'd "answered" when the customers wrote back in the afternoon.
Guess who was promoted?
Re:Excellent luck with Applecare (Score:3, Informative)
It's not a bad investment with their laptops, especially useful when you consider how much longer people hold on to Macs than do so with PCs, as you have said.
They seem to have been well trained. I've been getting people in Austin... anyone know whether they are Apple empolyees or whether it is outsourced?
The ones in Austin are actual employees. I've met a few, and I've also driven by there on trips to the main post office and seen the little Apple icons on the signs in front of the buildings.
Call Center Mecca (Score:3, Informative)
Oklahoma is like a third world country. So big ass companies don't outsource your low paying shit jobs to India or China send them to Oklahoma. They have more high school edumacated people than West Virginia, Arkansas, and Missippi combined! And the cost of doing business is low.