The folly of outscorcing - Ocwen

The folly of outsourcing U.S. jobs overseas came home these past few weeks as my wife and I have been trying to refinance our home in Arkansaw.

Our current mortgage holder, Ocwen, is dragging its feet through this process, largely because, I believe, it operates as an etherical company on fiber-optic cable and telephone lines rather than through a real building or a real center of operations. Although they do keep a P.O. Box in Orlando, Fla.

Most of the Ocwen representatives I've dealt with are from India. That's where the calls are being routed to after going through an extensive automated process. They're English is fine, but it's still spoken in an Indian accent which makes them hard to understand nonetheless and I doubt they understand my flat Midwestern accent.

Not only that, but when have to go through so many departments to put in requests or try to get them to move on something, something is going to be lost in translation. And what is someone in New Dehli going to care about my particular situation to get things done? They're not. They're just employed by the calling company that contracts with Ocwen. Sometime soon, these people will be answering phones for another company. I'm just another American customer to them. I'm not saying that's intentional. I'm saying that's life. They collect their paycheck at the end of the day and go home. They're not going to worry about whether or not my mortgage is stuck in limbo, they've got their own problems to worry about.

Ocwen may think its saving a buck employing people thousands of miles away to handle my account, but it will lose in the end when customers refuse to deal with it because they refuse to deal with their customers as Americans. I'm exercising my free-market right to say I will have no more dealings with Ocwen when this is all finally settled and I urge others not to touch them with a 10,000-foot pole, not unless you enjoy international telephone calling. At least Wells Fargo Financial gives me a real-live person who lives in my community to deal with.

If we all take our business to places that will deal with as real people, then companies will see no benefit to outsorucing and stop the practice.