Beware the perils of offshore tech support

An Adobe customer looks for an Audition expert and finds frustration in what may be yet another disturbing tech support trend

Tommy wrote to the Gripe Line after hitting a wall trying to get Adobe Audition to run correctly on Windows 7: "I sent an email to find out why I couldn't seem to control my input signal in multi-track mode and received a quick response in the form of a .pdf file. Cool. But that solution was something I'd already tried several times."

So Tommy called technical support hoping to find an expert who could walk him through what was obviously a more complex problem. "After spending more than five minutes getting the tech to understand that my name is 'Tommy' not 'Tammy,' he sent me to a specialist for the more difficult matter of resolving my issue with Audition."

[ Beware the painful lessons from IT outsourcing and offshoring gone bad. | Frustrated by tech support? Get answers in InfoWorld's Gripe Line newsletter. ]

An hour later, still on the phone, Tommy was no closer to finding someone who could help.

"I'm sure India has some very talented workers," he says. "I'm very sure the folks of India work for pennies a day. But after I was transferred several times to get to an expert who could help, after explaining this problem slowly three times, the expert's best suggestion was to try undocking or to maximize the level meter."

Though this solution might work if he was having a problem with the level meter, he wasn't. It had nothing to do with his signal input problem, giving Tommy cause to once again doubt this tech's "expert" status. Before Tommy could explain again, though, he was disconnected. Now he was not only frustrated but angry.

"I like Adobe products," he says. "But just like the rest of America, we're failing economically here in California. For a San Jose, California, company to send jobs to India while our unemployment is in the double digits is wrong. I've wasted my time, still don't have a resolution to my issue, and I'm very disappointed."

I can't do anything about the jobless rate in California and the rest of the United States or the fact that so much tech support is outsourced to India, but I can say that this is a complaint I've been hearing frequently lately. What's more, offshoring appears to be on the rise, with India still adding IT jobs despite the recession.

I contacted Adobe to see whether someone could get Tommy's copy of Audition working without subjecting him to another round of transferred calls, butchered names, and suspect advice. The next day I got a note from Tommy saying things were looking up.