Nest is apparently closing two of its customer support call centers (Folsom, California, and Dublin, Ireland), and instead are moving these call centers to Honduras and the Philippines. In what appears to be an effort to cut costs.
This is all according to a few posts on Reddit, which claim that employees in the Folsom office have gotten notice that their call center will be closing in the very near future. What’s surprising is the fact that Nest does have call centers in other parts of the US, and those are not closing (yet). Only the Folsom call center is. There are also call centers in Las Vegas, Nevada; and Austin, Texas.
Google, nor Nest has actually said a word about this, though it would be a huge surprise for them to say something. Typically companies don’t announce that they are closing call centers, as that is usually seen as bad press. And it’s already turning out to be bad press, a number of customers are pretty upset with this change, and some are even threatening to sell their Nest products. Similar to what happened when Google bought Nest many years ago.
Nest had some pretty good customer service. While other parts of the company were so-so, customer service was still top-notch. But with them moving customer service into Honduras and the Philippines, the level of customer service is likely going to be going downhill. Nest isn’t the only company that has moved its customer service overseas in recent years, a number of tech companies have already done so. And with that, their customer service has also gone downhill. So there’s a reason for Nest customers to be upset.
This is likely being done so that Nest can save some money. There are rumors that they were in talks with the companies that own the two call centers being shut down, to renew the contract. But talks fell through. And moving them to Honduras and the Philippines likely means less money for customer service, for Nest. And seeing as Nest has had a hard time selling its products, that’s not a huge surprise.
Since Google purchased Nest nearly five years ago, the company has had trouble turning a profit. It also hadn’t really released any new products until about a year ago, when it launch Nest Secure and Nest Hello. Before that, Nest was only releasing new colors of its current products and rebranding Dropcams after it purchased the company, later in 2014. There’s been plenty of reports about the turmoil inside Nest, and it looks like it’s still happening.
This could be Google looking to deprioritize Nest, even though it did just merge Nest with its Made By Google hardware team – though their customer service teams are still separate. Moving these customer service centers could actually turn out to be a good thing for Nest, it could still provide top-notch customer service, while also saving some cash by outsourcing its call centers. Of course, we’ll have to wait and see when the contracts for the Folsom and Dublin call centers run out.