Why is XM's customer service in Canada?

I called XM Satellite Radio’s customer service today. The representative said she was is in Canada and could not get XM radio. Is this real? I’m guessing I was actually talking to someone in India. The cost of doing business in Canada can’t be lower than in the United States and this is even more true since Canada can’t receive satellite radio.

So, is in XM’s customer service really in Canada? If so, are there real advantages to locating a US business in Canada?

Actually, the cost of business can be lower in Canada, for two reasons: our dollar, and our universal health care.

Our dollar has been trading at less than parity with the US dollar for many years now, and paying salaries in Canadian dollars rather than American is a competitive advantage in certain sectors. I imagine call centres would be one such case.

Also, employers in Canada don’t have to fund major health care programs as part of the benefits package, since we have universal health care for all residents of Canada. Many employers have “top-up” plans, to cover things that medicare doesn’t (e.g. - drug plans), but overall, this is a major incentive for companies to relocate to Canada. There was an article in Newsweek a month or two ago pointing out that the auto industry has been shifting production to Ontario from Michigan for just that reason.

I have at least three customers who have reduced U.S. operations in favour of more Ontario operations. The two universally cited reasons; cheaper health care costs and - I am not making this up - lower taxes.

having seen some numbers crunched on comparative total tax rates, I’m not surprised, Rick,but can you provide a bit more detail? Lower taxes on the employer, the employees, or both?

IIRC, there was a big push some years ago to attract call-centres to the Maritimes by offering various tax breaks and other incentives. The announced motive was to make up for cutbacks in fish quotas when the cod population was found to be dropping rapidly.

That’s pretty unclear, isn’t it? What I meant to say is that unemployment was very high after the fishing cuts, and the government hoped to create some jobs.

I’m not an accountant, so the details didn’t come up, but the gist of it was that the employer and employee both paid a lot more tax than they had anticipated. Property taxes are a frequent complaint - and I admit the figures I have been cited are exorbitant - as well as the myriad little taxes you pay there that don’t exist here.

Right now I’m still reeling over the fact that in Houston I paid something like FORTY PERCENT tax when I rented a car. There was some 11% municipal tax, and a 5% stadium tax, and a 15% car rental tourism somethigorother tax, or something like that. It was amazing. Doesn’t have muchto do with the topic, but that’s U.S. taxes. Maybe the income tax rate looks lower but they get you with a hundred other little things.

I found that very hard to believe - so I checked their site.

Like TV satellite providers, it seems like it’ll work in much Canada, but they don’t ‘provide’ the service here, probably due to problems with legislation and regulation. I assume that (like TV) if you pretend to be from the US or get someone from the States to sign up for you that it’ll work fine. Go grey market. :smiley:

I used to work as a trainer for a call center company that did technical support for a variety of companies and also had some knowledge of how other (competing) call center companies did things.

All sorts of things can have an impact on call center location. We opened up centers in the Southern US because the cost of living was lower there so we could pay less. Also at issue was unemployment levels, as the building I worked at was (at the time) in an area with low unemployment so we it could be hard to find people even at rates standard for the area. As time went on we got farther and farther out… call center in Canada, call center in Jamaica, call centers in India…

Companies don’t want to spend any money on support so any pennies they can save added up, and in Jamaica and India it’s insane how little they are paid but perfectly willing to work for. Of course there’s the problem with getting them to undestand what you are saying, both as an accent issue but also as a cultural literacy kind of thing.

Canada was a really good place to save some bucks and still get highly educated people who could relate to US callers.

But, as suggested in the OP, the call centers in foreign countries often instruct their workers to lie about their location.