Has outsourcing lead to poor customer service?

In the past few months, I had several pressing issue with a few service providers, which resulted in many calls to their customer service dept.

My first issue was changing my phone service from one carrier to another, but trying to keep the same phone number which I had had for few years.

The phone company was not able to port my current number from my old provider within the time frame they promised. After many calls to the customer service dept and waiting patiently for over two months, the phone company was not able to port my old number and I settled with a new number.

My many calls to their customer service dept, left a big question mark in my mind, about the benefits of outsourcing call centers. Most of the customer service representatives I spoke with were located outside of the US, mainly Asia. Although everyone I spoke to were very courteous, almost no one was able to understand my frustration or give me solid feedback on the issue I was trying to resolve. All I would hear was, “oh I am so sorry to hear that”, the representative didn’t have the right knowledge or training to guide me to the right solution, he or she would put me on hold each time I demanded action.

I made it clear to the representative, I didn’t want to hear them say “Oh I am so sorry to hear that”, that wasn’t going to help me.
I came to realize the cultural differences between some Asian countries and the US. Most of the representatives I spoke to were polite, but were not able to take the initiative and make decision which, I believe, reflected their cultural background ,where traditionally the decision must come from the top.

At the beginning of the outsourcing boom, the service was excellent and the representative would be well trained to understand the expectation of callers from US, but over time, I experienced a drop down in quality and I feel like most of the customer service representatives were hired to be courteous to the customers and repeat these words “Oh I am so sorry to hear that.”