The trend towards moving functions to overseas companies for content and services has pretty much waxed and is now on the wane. Our company has tried this route for a while now and the results have been mixed at best.
I will admit that at first the price rates that were quoted to us were pretty impressive and almost blinded us to everything else. But then we came to grips with the realities involved with this lower price. Some things that we found were service that was iffy, personnel that we could in no way vet nor even be sure actually existed (one company used bogus resumes to boost their image), delivery timelines that due to the location of their offices were hard to predict and would often be in the middle of the night for us. Any type of live communication would have to be held early in the morning before work or late at night after hours.
We would spend an inordinate amount of time on QC (quality control) making sure that the standards of the product and the final deliverables were up to the quality levels that we set. In one instance we had to totally scrap the content that they provided and had to redo the project in-house at the last-minute using our own people working late into the night to meet a next day deadline.
When we complained about this, the offshore provider merely shrugged and said that the deliverables “seemed fine to him”. To me that is just beyond the pale. How anyone, let alone a supposedly professional company would let a product out the door without doing any sort of editing is baffling. This provider didn’t even have a clue as to what QC was.
The thing that companies that use offshore providers must remember is that whether the product is good or bad, on time or late, that it’s going to be their reputation that will be on the line with the customer. You are not just being paid to do a job but trusted by a client to take on a task for their success and if you fail to deliver what you promise then you, not the offshore provider, will suffer the repercussions. You will be known as someone who is unreliable and that does not come through when called upon to do these type of jobs.
Despite all of these problems we’ve continued on with “offshoring”. We’ve had to implement stringent quality assurance guidelines that our current provider knows are unbreakable. If they fail to meet these standards then they lose our business.
May seem overly harsh but we are paying for a service and though we may not be paying top dollar, we still expect that service to be done and to be done properly. Nothing less will do.
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