Not that you can't get quality service from India, but there is sometimes an accent problem and phone line quality problem, and it's not America. They don't know where your town is and they won't comment on sports teams or weather, because they don't know that much about what's going on in America, and there is no "connection" like having a local person to talk to, someone that leads the same life as the customers and can relate to their issues.
BTW, in the top of the article above it mentions students getting tutoring in English homework from India. Ha ha, let me know how that turns out.
Exactly. I worked with zillions of Indian contractors at my previous worksite, and almost to a man, they were smart, motivated, friendly, and skilled--many of them with advanced degrees and downright brilliant, doing work that was actually underutilizing them. But, I got picked to do many things interfacing with our users (such as status reporting or training) because my English skills were better. I'm no English major, but I do reasonably well getting my point across.
You may not need communication skills for your first few years out of college in IT, but now those grunt-level coding and helpdesk jobs are going overseas and may never come back. The IT jobs that are staying here require good communication skills and good business knowledge in addition to good technical skills. Pradesh can slam out some code as fast as Suzie can, but even with Pradesh's excellent IIT education, Suzie can probably document it better...of course, assuming she wasn't a Womyn's Studies major at UC-Berkeley or some other such useless thing.
}:-)4