Will offshoring be the death of American companies? Perhaps not but what if intelligent competitors playing on inherent patriotism of potential costumers were to use offshoring as a way to take customers away from those companies that are known to put their service and support departments in other countries such as India?

Dell is one of the more famous companies using offshoring and we have all heard stories that many Dell customers are unhappy with the level of service they are receiving from the Texas based PC giant.

This environment presents a perfect opportunity for companies like MPC Computers to start advertising campaigns targeted at people who are sick and tired of dealing with offshored help desks. A new ad from the company has the following headline:

100% U.S. Based Service and Support

If you go to the specific site touted in the ad you see the following text:

100% U.S.-based service and support

At MPC Computers, we keep our tech support close to home.

At a time when most other PC companies are outsourcing their service and support to other countries, we're keeping our staff right here in the U.S. Our support reps sit right next to our product engineers-not in a different hemisphere. So if you have a problem, your question is answered quickly and accurately with as much technical information as you need.

MPC Computers builds products for speed, reliability and performance, like our new TransPort® 2300 notebook, featuring Intel® Centrino™ mobile technology and Microsoft Windows XP Professional, and the latest security features.

At MPC, we're committed to delivering great service and support, and we're committed to designing great products. Order your TransPort 2300 today. Because at MPC, we're behind you-100 percent.

I don't think I ever heard of this company before this ad and whenever I hear of a new company I go to Alexa, a company that tracks web traffic to see how much traffic their website gets. Alexa ranks sites based on their proximity to being the most popular website in the world.

Here is where the competitors rank:

MPC Computers ranks in the top 74,246 sites in the world.

To put this in perspective using another Alexa metric reach you can ascertain that Gateway computers gets 56 times the traffic that MPC gets. Not super impressive but their traffic chart is getting better. Perhaps these ads will help them grow faster.

This is the first ad I have ever seen like this and I hope it has some influence on customer's buying behavior. Sure, offshoring is inevitable but perhaps ads like this will slow it down a bit. Companies have to worry about the bottom line but let's face it -- service is bad enough using US agents. Generally speaking service gets much worse when done overseas as accents and other problems are thrown into the mix. If you are offshoring to save money and your support quality deteriorates, perhaps you will lose business to a company that is more customer service oriented than you are.