We’ve been hearing the rumble about “the death of service desks” for a while now. Word on the street is that outsourcing this function is giving way to unsourcing . (That’s the process where companies establish online resources or communities for peer-to-peer user support.) 

At Clearfield, we believe in oursourcing . Customer service is too important of a function to leave to chance.

There’s no debating the allure of outsourcing the service desk function to offshore locations like India, which quickly rose as the go-to, cost-effective outsource choice. India reportedly has built a $5 billion outsourcing business helping solve our high-tech problems. Some say that India has now been supplanted by the Philippines as the low cost provider – with China and some east African countries close behind.

According to an article in The Economist, entitled “Outsourcing is so passé,” unsourcing is the wave of the future. Essentially, it’s an online self-help desk where product users help problem-solve by offering fixes and short-cuts based on their own experiences. In some cases, technical teams may moderate the offered solutions to ensure their accuracy or viability.

Probably like you, I have turned to both outsourcing and unsourcing models for help with personal electronics.  Perhaps also like you, I have had good and bad experiences with both.

As I mentioned, at Clearfield, we don’t leave this kind of customer service to chance. Our clients are far too important to us to entrust problem-solving to anyone other than our trained experts. Each of our representatives go through extensive training, where every possible contingency is explored. This high-tech boot camp is not for the faint of heart (or mind).

We do have systems in place so our clients can get quick answers online, of course. We want to be sure that we’re available to them when they need us. But for the most part, we believe in the power of having real contact with our people who know what to do.

Oursourcing. This made-up word is growing on me.