Tutorial: How To Outsource Content to India
Lesson 8: What are the potential problems when outsourcing to India?

chillibreeze writer — Trixie Asirvatham

What are the potential problems I could face?

Doing business with Indian vendors may have some initial teething problems,as with vendors from any other country, because of cultural differences.

Be patient and persevering. Building a relationship with your vendor will smoothen the way to a positive business experience. For example, it may take some time for a writer to understand exactly what an American customer expects but given the time, the writer can adjust. For example we did a travel writing project that involved 6 Indian writers writing on hundreds of different destinations in the USA. The customer had to spend some time guiding the writers and giving them feedback so that they could adjust their style to meet the eyes of the American reader and the objectives of the website. Once this was done the writers changed their style to meet the audience. So be patient and flexible. It is only a question of time.

In the West, the orientation to business is primarily time-task-cost oriented while in India the vendor focuses on building relationships with clients first. This may cause frustration and delay as you and the vendor have different ways of approaching the work.

India ’s mature IT market and its experience with servicing some of the biggest North American companies make this country the primary outsourcing destination in the world. Companies usually set their service-level expectations high when outsourcing to India . However, India is a developing country and the service industry (non-IT) as well as the infrastructure is far from mature in comparison to first-world countries.

There are companies that can provide reliable quality content development at global standards. There are also plenty of companies who are not up to that level so it is best to start small until you have found a reliable vendor.

Typical problems are:

• Some companies may accept projects that they are not capable of completing
• Expectations of the level of quality may create some problems
• Distrust from both parties hinder efficiency
• Costs may be more than expected
• Cut and paste from other websites in common. Indian writers are not as sensitive to Intellectual Property rights as are many other Westerners. This needs to clearly discussed and verified!

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Tutorial Contents:

Introduction | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

| Questionnaire | Quiz |