"Onshoring" Support - A New Trend?

In a drive to reduce costs, IT companies have increasing turned to offshoring in recent years, to countries such as India and the Philippines. First went development, and later tech support. But while offshoring support has been popular among IT vendors, it has been less so among customers, who often have difficulty understanding the heavy accents of offsore support personnel.

Now, some vendors are bucking the trend. Redundant Internet access appliance maker Astrocom even makes its onshore tech support a selling point. As one customer put it, "If you can understand a Minne-soowta accent, you can understand their tech support people."

Finance and accounting (FAO) outsourcer API Outsourcing understands that it is handling sensitive client data as it processes payments, invoices, billing and other backoffice documents. While some competitors seem to have no problem sending such work overseas, API seeks to protect this information by doing all of it's backoffice processing in Minnesota and Wisconsin (okay, some Vikings fans may consider Wisconsin a foreign country, but most Americans accept its statehood).

Finally, enterprise content management consultant MBS Technologies avoids the accent problem by providing tech support from South Dakota.

Smaller tech vendors are often more nimble than their larger counterparts; could there be a trend here?

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