TurboTax sent me to India

I wrote this in my LJ today, and though I’d post it here too, just to let you all know what I ran into, and maybe get some feedback on the questions I ask of myself…
Just jotting this down, feel free to comment if you like. . .

The most nationalistic thing we as Americans do on a regular basis is pay our fucking taxes. You would THINK that the company who handles the taxe software and filing of a huge portion of the population would at least hire AMERICANS to handle their customer service? Or hire people on this continent, failing that?You think they might want people that speak English well at least moderately well?

You’d be wrong to think that, as was I. Not that I was expecting its’ employees to be one nationality or the other when I called for help last Friday. But what I got was charged $14.95, transferred to India, where some guy had great difficulty communicating with me, and great difficulty getting the refund. Although I do need to mention, that when I offered to just hang up and call the credit card company and have them deny the charge, the charges were suddenly found and were able to be refunded immediately. We were going to reinstall and purchase the license again right away, though, correct?

I called back a little while later, after we had discussed this a bit. I asked for a supervisor (yes I’ve read all the telemarketer threads, but I had to ask anyways). After a bit of hassle, I got one, who gave me the name of “Kevin”, and refused to identify himself further. I asked what country he was located in and he refused to answer. I could hear the background noise of multiple people on telephones though, and each accent was distinctly from India.

So today, bitch that I am, I called the Corporate HQ out in Ca. I asked the nice lady who answered the phone if there was some sort of customer rep available. She asked why, and I told her my story, and she said “We outsource to India?”. She hooked me right up with the fellow that directs customer service. He tried to defend their weird book-keeping style on old DOS programs that their systems run on.

Right, this is INTUIT I’m talking to! He says they need the old DOS programs so that the information that they transmit back and forth to India (our personal, tax, and credit card info) can be securely encrypted. In fact, that was the only way it could be securely encrypted. IF that is the case, then why am I not using this to transmit MY personal, tax and credit car info in your TurboTax program you fucking idiot? I sure don’t see any old DOS based programs in there.

So then he defends their practices of outsourcing all my private info to another country, (I was right, it was India) claiming that the reduced cost of customer service “helps our economy by raising our stock price, our market price”. How that helps anyone but the major stockholders, I cannot fathom.

I flat told this guy, it feels very very un-American, and I"m not the most patriotic of Joe’s out there. I’m very sure I’m not the only one that would frown upon this, especially as tales of people losing their jobs increase daily, and money gets tighter all around. I pointed out that this product taps into two very personal areas, our taxes (preparing and filing) and our wallets (credit card info being handled carelessly).

You know, he said I was the only person that had mentioned this to himor to Intuit, the only one in America to call and complain, about the customer service itself, and their location in general. Which I find hard to believe.

OK, I guess what I want to know here is this:

Am I a flipping wingnut? Did I get weird on myself when I was busy and not looking? Or am I just having a momentary patriotic/wallet type moment that inspires me to want to give Intuit major grief over this?

Outsourcing overseas is pretty common now and, yes, this is causing thousands of Americans to lose their jobs, but you can buy the Indians pretty cheap ( though someone told me last week that they thought the Pakistanis were catching up) and why pay more than you have to?

I know a lot of call center work is outsourced and I once worked for a company that tried to outsource some software development, but that didn’t work out too well – the code we got back was a mess and we ended up just doing it ourselves . I suppose there are other types of work ripe for outsourcing, but I’m not aware of them.

Is the problem really because it happens to be a tax preparation software you’re calling about?

I’ve got a buddy that works in IT for Intuit, and he mentioned recently that they were outsourcing their customer service to India, so I wasn’t surprised at all.

You’ve got to wonder how many other service lines are really being answered by folks outside the US.