Customer Facing Employees
Here is an article about Conseco hiring back some of its call center employees after outsourcing the jobs to India. Here is a nice quote by some guy that I think is obvious, but I guess it took a while for that schmuck Gary Wendt (not Norm, that's George Wendt, but the guy who used to run GE Capital and his wife took him for a bunch of cash) to figure it out:

"Call centers may not generate money directly. But they add revenue in that most customers' only direct interaction with the company is through their employees, who effectively become the face of the company," said Butler, who wrote a book on call-center management published earlier this month. "When customers call an American company, but the voice on the other end of the phone clearly is not, the customer wonders why those jobs are overseas. If the service level turns out to be dissatisfactory as well, that may not be the best message to send."

I'm not against outsourcing or offshoring, but it never seemed like a good idea to me to send customer facing jobs away.