I saw this happen in reverse.
I was buying servers from Rackable in orders of several millions of dollars. They bought SGI. Fired their Bay Area support staff, moved support to Ohio which was a huge short term gain. But support became so bad it was literally worth less than nothing. They would take in a machine with a known fault (raid controller let’s say) fail to replace the card, ship back a machine that didn’t boot.
After the fifth failure in a row I had enough.
It was easier to learn how to repair my own servers and do the work in-house. I bought parts instead of support, qualified a new server provider and shifted the next six million in orders to them.
No offense against the guys in Ohio, but due to unfamiliarity with the tech, structural and leadership shortcomings etc. they were simply unable to do the job so the work shifted back to the Bay Area anyway.
I’m sure I was one customer among hundreds if not thousands who experienced this change.
One of the downsides of my support example is that there is a lot of outsourcing and cost cutting in that area of work (one of the reasons I left).
So there will be tons of stories like yours that I don't doubt are true.... it's just location probabbly had less to do with it as just a general desire to cut costs at any cost...
>it's just location probabbly had less to do with it as just a general desire to cut costs at any cost...
Exactly this. In a previous role at an Enterprise software company I watched customer satisfaction take a dive after cost cutting measures and support and escalations paths and metrics were changed. The same customer support people who had really happy customers started to have unhappy customers. It had very little to do with the people or location and everything to do with what options the customer services people had to help a customer.
Their overall goal was to be as effective as they could be. The cost savings went along with operational improvements. It was also a non-profit, which has an entirely different dynamic compared to a for-profit customer relationship.
I'm totally on-board with there being region-specific niches where it simply works better to have support in that area.
Farmers from the Midwest get pretty annoyed when Congress passes laws which cannot, in any practical/economically feasible way, be followed. The laws may be perfectly reasonable when looking at factories, but make little sense applied to farmers
I kind of agree with the people above if you take an experienced team then replace it with another team(with cost cutting added in), it could be a block down the road and your going to run into problems.
After the fifth failure in a row I had enough. It was easier to learn how to repair my own servers and do the work in-house. I bought parts instead of support, qualified a new server provider and shifted the next six million in orders to them.
No offense against the guys in Ohio, but due to unfamiliarity with the tech, structural and leadership shortcomings etc. they were simply unable to do the job so the work shifted back to the Bay Area anyway.
I’m sure I was one customer among hundreds if not thousands who experienced this change.