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The aftershocks of a massive earthquake and deadly tidal wave won't force U.S. companies to close their calling centers in India, economists said.
In fact, very few U.S. companies that outsource customer service were financially hit by the quake because most of their calling centers are further inland in cities such as Bangalore and New Delhi or in Mumbai -- on the opposite coast from the disaster, said Robert Hartwig, an economist with the Insurance Information Institute in New York.
However, the revelation brought little relief to Americans who found themselves trying to get help from unresponsive tech support teams over the holiday. Last week, Linda Wosskow, a small business owner in San Francisco, encountered a problem with her security software and was left on hold by the Symantec customer service team for hours. She could not get through to tech support.
When she finally reached someone in Symantec's president's office, she was told there was a disruption in tech support service because Symantec's calling center is in India, one of the countries hit by a massive earthquake and deadly tsunami Dec. 26. As of Monday morning, the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and lethal tidal wave had killed 155,000 people in a dozen countries, including India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia.
Symantec's tech support is up and running. But Wosskow said the company should have been more upfront about the delay.
"What does this mean for outsourcing?" she asked. "The other thing is why don't they train their customer service people to say it the way it is? I don't want them to tell me someone will pick up the phone in 10 minutes and then they don't. Or, if they don't call me back, I don't want to hear, 'I will get back to you' and then they don't. It's frustrating and it's unprofessional."
More than likely service was disrupted because the calling center's employees had family members living in the afflicted areas of the country. Hartwig compared the disruption in service across the country -- but on a much larger scale -- to the way U.S. office workers reacted when they heard about the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York.
"There is no doubt this was a major distraction for the staff," Hartwig said.
He doubted there was actual damage to Symantec's infrastructure. U.S. companies with calling centers in India are set up to handle a natural disaster of this magnitude, he added.
"These centers all have backup power because the power grid in India is unreliable," Hartwig said.
"The impact (of the tsunami) on the U.S. economy is quite modest," echoed Robert Hormats, an economist with Goldman Sachs. "The businesses we have in that area is mainly tourism. But many of those (businesses) are locally owned."
It is difficult to estimate the loss in revenue due to failures by customer calling centers. The quake hit mostly remote fishing and farming villages and some tourist resorts, Hormats said. Symantec and another U.S. company, AT&T, reported only a "very brief outage."
"From a network perspective, the only effect we saw was a very brief outage on a consortium-owned submarine fiber-optic cable," said AT&T spokesman Jim Byrnes. "The outage was cleared when a telephone administration in the region switched to spare capacity on another cable."
AT&T saw no other disruption in business, including phone calls placed to people in the region.
Symantec insists its tech support line didn't work for 15 minutes. But as of Monday, Wosskow still hadn't resolved the problem with her security software, which won't let her send and receive e-mail.
"It's a quiet week, but there are things I would be able to do," she said. "It's more the stress of not being able to solve the problem."
