Dexcom announces support being outsourced to the Philippines

Heard it announced on today’s earnings call which announced record revenues & profits, followed by confirmation from a Dexcom employee that everyone is being laid off. They were notified during the earnings call, and none of the Dexcom outside sales people were notified. One of them is an old friend of mine and she is livid!

It’s a personal choice, but I refuse to do business with companies who offshore support to line executives’ bank accounts. So this Dexcom customer will be switching to an alternative. I’ll report back with my findings.

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I seriously hope this “outsourcing” is for the primary call intake, and that they will maintain a US based call center for escalated cases. If I were a Dexcom employee and found out on the earnings call, I would be equally upset.

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The announcement implied that their Philippine Call Center is being expanded to handle all calls resulting in a layoff of 350 staff members (13% of staff) in their San Diego, CA and Mesa AZ facilities. Dexcom has a wonderful product which fully deserves the company and its shareholders to enjoy record growth in revenues and profits. That being said, we all know that customer support has lately been seriously lacking and that is of great concern to us, the users of their products. I am thrilled to see that they are doing everything they can to address their customer support services. As much as I would prefer to see the jobs remain in the US, I understand that the US does not have the capabilities to scale resources to meet its growth in the same manner that can be done in other countries.

At least it is nice to hear the company has gone to the Philippines, where there not only is a huge talent pool of readily available very tallented employees, but they speak an English we can actually understand in the US. Let’s see what happens as I think most of us are not pleased with the service available from Dexcom US.

Good luck Dexcom!!! We all look forward to a resolution of your customer care issues.

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Sorry, but you are 100% wrong about the ability to scale in the US. I have been in Senior Management both in operations and IT for sales and customer support for over 25 years.

It was crystal clear that Dexcom’s plan was to kill these jobs in the US from approximately three years ago. They hired substandard managers over these areas, and they did not take into account the 21st century workplace which is focused on work from home for skilled customer support and inside sales. As an example, in the Phoenix area there are over 30,000 work from home sales and support employees. There is a substantial cost of maintaining these workers in company owned or leased real estate.

Dexcom’s sole interest is in enriching their Senior Management. Obviously in the short-term, this helps shareholders. However in the long run, this sets the company up for either being acquired or being knocked off by better managed competition. I don’t believe either case bodes well for Dexcom’s customers.

Again, I have zero interest in doing any business with companies who cannot be competitive with American workers. The only reason that manufacturing isn’t going to be sent to some backwater Chinese town is due to regulation. It will be interesting to see if their legal liabilities increase and regulatory oversight kicks in due to offshoring technical support. I suppose that their executive team believes that won’t happen before they get their payouts, cut bait and run.

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From Reddit:

" Dexcom just fired most of their American Staff

Thought you should know, Dexcom laid us all off today. we’re employed for a little bit longer if we want our severance packages (which are really really bad).However we don’t get those severance packages if we accept a job somewhere else before they let us leave or if we’re “not in good standing” whatever the [redacted] that means.

So when you call in and your sales rep or your tech support rep gives you [redacted] service or doesn’t even speak very good english. Yeah, that’s because Dexcom decided you guys aren’t worth spending money on for good service.

Our new tech support offices are located in the phillipines (outsourced) and Ohio (outsourced)

Oh and in case you’re wondering, Dexcom made massive profits last year.

Looks like manufacturing kept their job, but just about everyone else is gone aside from executives and their fat wallets.
Manufacturing is eventually being replaced by robots though, so whatever"

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From the CFO:
“International sales in the quarter were consistent with our expectations and were up 72% over Q4 2017 on a reported basis or 75% excluding the impact of foreign exchange rate changes. Consistent with the first three quarters of the year, our fourth quarter growth continued to be driven by our direct markets. Fourth quarter gross margins improved from the third quarter as expected to 66%, resulting in a gross profit of $223 million. Operating expenses were $387 million for Q4 2018, including a $218 million one-time non-cash research and development charge related to the amendment of our Verily agreement. Apart from this non-recurring charge, fourth quarter operating expenses were $170 million compared to $142 million in Q4 2017. This reflects an increase of 20% year-over-year and compares favorably to our 53% revenue growth in the quarter.”

So they made almost a quarter of a BILLION dollars gross profit in the fourth quarter, but they need to go offshore. Right…

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I can explain what that means.

“Good Standing” requirement to receive your severance package upon a layoff when your job has been transferred overseas means you suck it up and spend the next 6 weeks (or however long management decides is necessary) in order to train your replacement.

If you get a bad attitude and do not want to train your replacement (who will likely be making about 10 cents on the dollar as compared to you) then you are subject to immediate termination with no severance package.

Pretty sure that sums it up.

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I don’t know of anything more demeaning and demoralizing than being tasked with training one’s replacement.

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Well - it actually is worse than that when there is not even a pretense that the other person is even remotely qualified.

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One of the top causes behind support quality dropping is that Dexcom hasn’t prioritised the fairly easy task of accurately integrating Salesforce with their Oracle ERP.

So your friendly inside refill sales person takes your order, and it is either held by a QA audit or doesn’t make it to Oracle until someone (you) noticed it hasn’t processed.

As hinted earlier, I’ve been working with Salesforce integrations since 2001, this isn’t rocket science. Neither is supporting work from home workers which eliminates a huge chunk of cost for American employees (real estate) as well as retention and recruiting.

I hope not to be beating a dead horse here, but it appears to me that the execs have never made serving customers a priority. Many examples of this but here’s one big one - customer care doesn’t open until 9:00am EST and they immediately have 200 calls in queue which they never recover from, and the poor customers are on hold for an hour or more. Well run customer focused companies open their phones at 7:00am or 7:30am EST and they don’t have a massive queue to beat down.

Apparently US customers will have to rely on resellers like Edgepark, etc. for everything but tech support which appears is going to be a Thrilla in Manila.

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I’ve heard “quality control” many times when speaking to the sales people. ie, they take my order, but then say it has to go thru quality control prior to shipment. They also mention that QC is checking current benefits and that all paperwork is in their possession such as chart notes, etc.

I’ve never been on hold for an hour. Usually hold times for sales is less than 3-5 minutes for me. I’m in Calif, so I can call early!

Bummer. Manufacturing will still be in the US? You know what this means? Chinese are gonna make cheap BG sensors soon. I believe they may own the communications infrastructure there. Correct me if Im wrong. Huawei’s Video Surveillance Business Hits Snag in Philippines - WSJ

Truly sad, you would think with record profits they could start service overseas and offer all employees severance packages to stay and lose employees through attrition and job transfers and by announcing the job will be phased out over time. Announcing record profits and BTW you don’t have a job anymore is the best way to upset, really upset people. And the manufacturing will be thinking at any given point their jobs will be gone soon too and be handled as bad.

Which also means for all of us that have Dexcom, possible sub service, because face it, not only is communicating with people overseas a problem a good deal of the time, but also the manufacturing will now possibly go downhill, unhappy worried workers or a foreign company taking over with substandard goods.The supply chain of needed supplies could end up being compromised.

All because someone did not have the common sense to handle the situation better.
Maybe not, but I’m thinking/wondering I should have stayed with the Libre until things settle down. Because it sounds like it’s going to get messy.

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Sad. No wonder when I sent a new inquiry for information yesterday, I got nothing but a “you already are in our file” reply. Usually the rep writes back. Not this time. I’ll keep on working to fund my Libre sensors.

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Interesting. Just a while ago they were Medicare Approved so now, your taxes are supporting their move overseas? It may well be financially advantageous but I’ll bet President Trump will skewer them

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Sorry for posting after I said that I wouldn’t. But the White House is aware. Whether they comment or not remains to be seen.

giphy%20(1)

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Dexcom sucks anyway.

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If it makes you guys feel less mad, I believe they are basically giving away any patents on their technology. They own nothing now. Nothing. The tech will be in foreign markets in no time. Its unfortunate for them. Poor decision making. They are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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My diabetic endo nurse says that Medtronic is already there and lots of people couldn’t get supplies during the last hurricane. Just something to be aware of.

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