Call centers, despite all their economic and financial benefits (both for the companies outsourcing the work and for the countries it is outsourced to), have one major drawback.
The drawback is that there will always be a cultural rift between the call center executive and the person calling.
You can teach a call center executive how to sound like an American or Englishman, what kind of food they like, some of the cities and places of interest but you can't teach how to intrinsically be an American or Englishman.
The tradeoff foreign corporations make for the immense savings that outsourcing brings is a culturally disconnect.
If, at the end of the day, corporations are truly committed to providing quality customer service, this is an issue they must iron out.
The best way that foreign corporations can balance this concern out with their desire to cut costs is to outsource technical support to eastern countries in Europe.
Two countries in particular stand out as great opportunities for companies that want to outsource their operations to countries that are less culturally disconnected then those in Asia like India and Malaysia.
One of them is the landlocked country of Hungary.
Hungary, during the Cold War, was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union and its economic policies.
When the Communist government in the Soviet Union dissolved and Hungary became a democracy it readily embraced free market capitalism.
Outsourced technical support operations in Hungary are not as cheap as they are in other countries in the world and they definitely cannot compete with the cost of labor in countries like India.
However, Hungary's advantage is its education.
Hungary prides itself on having one of Europe's best education systems.
It is little wonder that Hungary has produced thirteen Nobel Prize winners and that Hungarians hold thousands of important patents for innovations we use every day.
More importantly for foreign corporations, shifting operations to Hungary can reduce their operational costs by 25%.
The deficit between the money they could save by shifting operations to Asian countries is compensated for by the fact that Hungarians can give specialized, highly technical customer care without a cultural disconnect.
In this area, the BPO markets of India, the Philippines and Malaysia (among others) simply cannot compete effectively.
Hungary also has excellent telecommunications infrastructure supported by a vibrant IT industry.
Already several foreign companies ranging from General Electric to Bosch have set up operations in Hungary, both voice and back-end data.
Poland is another east block, formerly Communist country that has vast potential for outsourcing technical support.
The call center industry in Poland is relatively young having been around only since 1999.
The Polish BPO industry, culturally, is well suited to serve the needs of major European countries like Germany not only in voice operations but also in data entry and back-end data processing operations.
Like Hungary, Poland has a highly educated populace.
There is already a large domestic call center market and, therefore, the Polish are well accustomed to technical support making them ideal candidates for international outsourcing of technical support operations.