Dell Inc, a leading direct seller of computers, is shifting technical support for its business customers from Bangalore to the United States following complaints about difficulty in understanding the accents of its Indian staff.
The Texas-based company did not give any timeframe for moving the support for its Optiplex desktops and Latitude notebooks back to the United States. Nor was it known how many job are involved.
But support calls for individual customers and other products would continue to be handled by one of its 20 call centres overseas.
Dell, which had aggressively moved to locate call centres outside the United States to cut costs, probably is the first company to move them back to the US for business customers who account for 85 per cent of its growing revenue.
A company spokesman confirmed that there were complaints from clients but declined to discuss their nature. However, media reports said they were about differing accents.
"Corporate customers were telling us they didn't like the level of support they were getting and in the normal course of business, we made some adjustments," its spokesman was quoted by InfoWorld, which specialises in IT news as saying.
"What (customers) said was, 'You guys have been changing some things and we don't like it as much," vice president of Dell's corporate division Steve Felice told Mercury News.
About 54 per cent of Dell's 44,300 employees are overseas.
Dell is among dozens of high tech companies, which have set up technical support in India, China and other countries to cut down costs because of cheaper labour. But workers and several politicians have opposed the move. This could become an issue in the election year.
The announcement of Dell's decision comes within days of the Indiana Governor Joe Kernan canceling a $15.2 million contract between a State agency and Tata America
International Corp to upgrade the computer in an effort to give chance to the State based companies.
