Just finished the (hopefully) final round of tech support merry-go-round with a host/registrar.

The problem – a fairly straightforward one. I wanted to transfer all my holdings with this outfit to another party, who created an account with this specific organization just for this purpose. I have done numerous such transfers in the past, with other hosts. The transfer happens online, and is completed in minutes.

Not with this outfit. I had to download, fill out and fax a form (not the subject of my gripe). I had to place multiple phone calls to tech support (to a call center in the Philippines, it turns out, but not the subject of my gripe, either). The subject of my gripe is that nobody knew what the right form was, but nobody would admit that, either.

Three different support "analysts" kept promoting three different forms with unwavering confidence. The third suggestion not only did not look right, it didn’t even look wrong. So I called the company HQ in the US, which emailed me the right (completely different) form.

The process of locating the right form was sabotaged not by a language barrier, but by a cultural barrier. None of the analysts could (or would) say that they did not know the answer to my question. They kept insisting that the obviously wrong form was the right form.

In his book "Outliers: The Story of Success," author Malcolm Gladwell examines the role of culture in the crash of Korean Air Flight 801 in 1997. In a nutshell, the second pilot dared not tell the first pilot that the first pilot was making a mistake. So the second pilot’s inaction killed everybody on board. What Korean Air was struggling with was a cultural legacy. Once they figured out that their problem was cultural, they fixed it.

US companies offshoring tech support to countries with different cultures will do well to study Korean Air’s mistakes.