What to do when your ISP off-shores tech support

Sat Dec 27 19:58:07 UTC 2008

On 27 Dec 2008, at 05:59, JF Mezei wrote:

> The problem with oursourced first level support is that they are  
> totally disconnected from real time operations and wouldn't be aware  
> of problems that network engineers are currently working on.

That's a problem with a lot of internal first line teams too..

Offshore and outsource are different things, and when done right are  
irrelevant to the quality of service delivered.  A willingness to  
offshore means you can deliver follow-the-sun NOC or support service,  
which can drive down delivery costs and health/safety risks for the  
organisation and drive up service quality by meaning that callers  
reach someone alert and awake ;-).  Outsourcing offshore service makes  
it cheap and easy to do that.

Doing this well relies on building a process, and actually a different  
process for each network being supported, though I don't want to give  
away all the hints that I learned the hard way !

Andy