Michael Meredith, Chief Executive of the Australian Teleservices Association, has warned against offshoring call centres and believes that the Indian telemarketing caused grief for the entire industry.

At today's Zeacommunity 2010 opening keynote speech in Auckland, Meredith told attendees that offshoring is guaranteed to lose customers.  This follows yesterday’s TelstraClear announcement that contact centre roles may be offshored to the Philippines.

“I don’t agree with offshoring. I think it’s a stupid move,” he said. “Why would you upset your customer base? Everything I’ve seen, every bit of evidence I’ve read... customers don’t like it. It’s as simple as that. There may be an argument for large volume, low gain, backend processing work that a monkey can do. Fantastic. If that works for you go and do it.

“But if you’re going to be talking to a customer why the hell would you go and send them off to India? Why send them to China? I’m a firm believer that any customer interactions should be dealt with by the country of origin.”

Meredith went on to call out India. “I don’t want to bag the Indians but Indian telemarketing has caused grief for the industry for the last five years across the region in Australia. Culturally they’re completely different. The Chinese are completely different.”

His message was clear, if you’re a New Zealand company and have a call centre in New Zealand, don’t move it offshore. “No matter what people say about what it will save you, in the end it will cost you customers.”

Meredith highlighted a recent study by Access Economics that looked at the cost comparison of building a call centre in a regional location in Australia as opposed to offshoring. “They found the argument really didn’t stick up about offshoring to the point now where we’re seeing very much a slowdown in offshoring,” he added. “If we moved our calls centres from Australia to Thailand for example... it just doesn’t work.”