Tech Support, as they prefer to call themselves, are call centers, mostly concentrated in the Nearest to Capital Region (NCR), Delhi, India. The major chunk of this pie are Noida & Gurgaon. There are many factors contributing to the mushrooming growth of this industry in this region.
First, they are the industrial hub of near to Delhi region, famous for excellent infrastructure, which are busy during daytime, but would otherwise remain idle at night but for these kind of Call Center industry who work during night. So, the kind of infrastructure they get is far superior to what they would get at the same cost during daytime.
Second, the region is full of well trained, highly skilled call center people, who are available at night for some decent extra income. Many of them have shifted full time into this industry.
Third, the resources both tangible and intangible become readily available at night, combined with the opportunity to present their services to the best paymasters of the world, the US people, who by nature’s design are about 7 to 12 hours behind in time zone, desperately seeking services of these kind. A perfect match of demand and supply!
What is Technical in Tech Support?
If this is a call center industry who are dab hand at registering the complaint of brand consumers and helping them services, reach out to them, what is technical in them, one may wonder. Actually, the bad part of this, very little! Most of the solutions offered are common sense application, which tech savvy people themselves, can fix easily.
No Doubt, there is a big need of professional help for these kind of daily tech nuisances, despite the apparent simplicity of the problems. Software issues even minor ones, can be quite handful and solution though simple may not be everybody’s cup of tea. However, very few of these so called tech-support companies, devote time and money into mastering these technical stuffs or hiring someone with such capabilities. So, only few of them fulfill what they promise. Rest of them are just champions of words and at best be described as con artists, who know how to pull a fast one, selling some fictitious service bundles.
More important, they gain the insight into what consumers are actually looking for, from their experience while actually working for some brands like HP, Dell, Microsoft etc. You can say, the expertise these companies bestow on their employees for serving their customers, are used in fooling their customers buy some fictitious bundles by their ex-employees or even existing ones!
Role of Search Engines
Search engines are the first place where a person seeking the solution for his problem would go and type a search query. Here, the Search Engines, like Bing and Google connects a person in USA to the Call center in India and the rest is fate. Google, the most dominant search engine, provides most of the opportunity.
The Ugly
Google, till recently, used to provide dedicated support to this industry through some “Google Authorized” agency and some self proclaimed “Operations Partners” of Google who were also privileged to use google.com email ids. The free adwords voucher program of Google, run through its privileged partners, increased the number of players exponentially. Many new entrants knew the free route to enter this industry. It was an era when Google Adwords free vouchers used to arrive with a covering letter shamelessly suggesting all you have to do is to open a New account (errr… with New Business Address). It helped Google push the CPC astronomically higher. There were other perks too into the bargain. I have witnessed an account which had the privilege to use trademarked term of brands they pretended. I was not buying into the client’s story, initially. However, I could myself see, just as claimed by the client, the ads first got disapproved and magically all of them termed approved the next day! My jaw dropped!
