Offshore Call Centres in India

I wonder how much money companies who make UK staff redundant in favour of call centers in India actually think they are saving.

Let us imagine that a company saves 500 jobs in the UK at say, £20,000 per employee difference in salary.

That's a maximum of £10 million saved per year.

Add back into that the cost of training in India plus the telecom equipment re-routing on-cost.

Take out the hidden cost of customers that say - "I love India and the Indian people but I want my service provider to have UK staff understanding the British way of doing things "- and get up and leave.

Are the managers of the already fabulously wealthy companies that move their first-line service centers offshore doing the right thing just to save a measly few quid a year?

Supermarket Car Parks

I am convinced that millions of gallons of petrol are wasted each year driving in and out of the car parks at out of town shopping malls and filling stations.

Instead of a simple entry exit system using the minimum of distance, it occurs to me that the architects have dipped a hedgehog in ink and just let it wander aimlessly around the drawing board in order to design the car park layout as lengthy and as complicated as possible.

Aircraft Black Box's

After the tragedy at Madrid Airport this month I ask why are civil aircraft still carrying in-flight data and cockpit voice recorders - the so called Black Box's (actually they are bright yellow!)

Surely in this technological age we can transmit many channels of data in real-time from the aircraft via satellite or whatever to a remote monitoring station.

As it is we monitor just a few aircraft parameters and record them on little more than audio tape just like our old reel-to-reel tape recorders.

In the event of an accident, the data recorders are searched for, not always easy if the crash is mid ocean.

SAGE SOFTWARE RIP OFF

Mushroom Components has been using Sage Line 50 software for 8 years.

Today we spoke to their technical support team about a very simple problem which could have been answered by them in about 30 seconds.

They wanted £650 YES - thats SIX HUNDRED & FIFTY pounds before they would speak to us....

Is that a RIP OFF or what??

ICSource and feedback

I am amazed to read in ICsource's comments section that Innovative Components Specialists in Florida has been burnt by Cheaper Electronics Inc of New York.

There are almost 20 - YES TWENTY pieces of bad feedback about Cheaper Electronics on the ICsource web site - yet companies are still giving them credit terms.

Those that do in my opinion are wholly irresponsible, naive, and deserve all they get.

As my old sales manager Bill Clinker was always telling us...." an order aint an order untill its been shipped and paid for!"