eh, unless you are hiring your buddy who lives in india, there are usually a lot of other not so obvious costs involved. unless you know someone who is working from home, you usually go through middlemen who take a pretty big cut. And part of that is doing business in other places is weird and different from doing business here in America.

All that aside, wages in India aren't 1/15th of what they are in the less economically developed parts of the USA, at least not for reliable people capable of working remote for American companies.

It depends a lot what you are after as well. Do you want someone who is able to rigidly enact a customer service manual and is hopefully understandable on the phone to your customers? Or do you want someone who is easily understandable and is able to make complex decisions based on individual customers cases?

There is going to be a pretty big difference in cost between the 2.

Also in our limited experience hiring in India you are going to want to pay a bit of a premium if you want low turnover.

but those things are both true in America, too. My point was just that the minimum bar for "can work with Americans remotely" puts your Indian labor way above 1/10th what you'd pay for the same thing in low labor cost parts of the US. From what I've seen, a 2x savings is... optimistic.

I'm just trying to make the point that this myth that you can get someone who speaks English and has enough knowledge of American customs to deal with customer support for under $1/hr is just a myth.