Common Complaints Against Outsourcing Online

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We don’t want you to judge outsourcing services based on a minor number of complaints because the number of successes, particularly at vWorker, are far too great. You could count complaints about outsourcing services until the cows come home, in fact. They still won’t outnumber the quantity of positive results that hundreds of thousands of people experience.

The critical issue is what to make of the criticisms that you do find. On one hand, you don’t want to work with a high-risk outsourcing resource. On the other hand, you don’t want to walk into an outsourcing arrangement wearing rose-colored glasses either. Here are some of the most common complaints you’ll hear, and their rebuttals.

“It Supports Cheap Labor and Produces Poor Work”

Although the amount paid for work may be small to you, that same amount is often much larger to the service provider who receives it, and therefore, doesn’t necessarily indicate poor work. $100 to you, for example, could be $1,000 to a foreign service provider who is willing to do a good job for it.

“It Supports Copyright Infringement”

Allegations of copyright or trademark violations and/or patent infringement are usually taken seriously at most of the popular outsourcing services. For specifics, you’ll need to read the service agreements of these institutions, as they may vary. Look for information on how to file either a copyright/patent infringement complaint or a counter-complaint.

“It Favors Service Providers” or “It Favors Outsourcers”

A common misconception people have about services (like vWorker, which offers arbitration) is that they could successfully exist and favor one side. The truth is, they rely on both their outsourcers and service providers. Without fairly treating both, they couldn’t sustain any type of business.

“It’s Too Hard To Use”

All outsourcing services offer some sort of support, some more than others. At vWorker, for instance,  you have access to live support via email or chat or phone seven days -a-week. And its requirements/project wizard help make working with a project easy to understand. You won’t find this wizard at every outsourcing service, though you will find a commonality among the interface of all the popular services. I.e., learn how to use one — you’ve learned how to use them all.

“It Supports Unqualified Coders”

vWorker’s ExpertRating program, Expert Guarantee program, and Ratings and Feedback system, help you avoid underperforming service providers. Other tools include a money-back guarantee, a completely free arbitration process on all types of projects, and a seven-day-a-week phone support system.

Here, I can only speak about the way vWorker handles underperforming service providers because I’m not sure what other services do with them. In essence, if vWorker’s providers continuously underperform and lose too many arbitration cases, the service removes them from the site. Plain and simple.

Other services may not treat underperformers as strictly, and that really is something you should research before outsourcing through one.

“All Its Workers Speak Poor English”

You don’t have to work with a foreigner to experience a communication breakdown. All outsourcing services host an large number of native workers living on the East Coast, the West Coast, in the Northern states, and in the Southern states. Miscommunications could still occur because of syntax and/or semantic differences.

Just so you know, you can prevent a lot of problems by predicting troubling issues and then addressing how those issues will be addressed in the outsourcing contract. You won’t be able to predict every issue – no one can. But you can at least address some of the more common ones by working with a service that provides free escrowing, free monitoring tools, and free arbitration.