OT: Off shore call center workers mad at American

[Hunpecked]

I agree with Thermodyne. As an American consumer I shouldn't have to call halfway around the world, only to find incompetent support personnel!

I'm sure there are plenty of incompetent support personnel available right here at home!!!

[geoschmo]

As someone who has worked in customer support for almost ten years I can tell you that the problem you describe isn't really caused by the outsourcing. Language problems aside, you are likely to get the same level of non-support from a help-desk staffed by people right here in the good ole USA. It's a lack of training by the company, and understaffing caused by stetching too few people over too many product lines. It's difficult as hell for those first and second level people to really get proficcent with the products they are supporting, since they rarely if ever actually use them and only spend their days sitting at a desk taking calls. And when only metric your company judges your performance by is how quickly you answer the phone and the number of calls you take, you can see how actually helping the customer to resolve their problems gets lost in the shuffle.

At any rate, being rude with the person answering the phone isn't helpful. I'm sure given their preferance they would want to help you with your problem. It's not their fault they don't speak english fluently and aren't sufficently trained. They are just trying to earn a living like everybody else. Save your anger for the manufacturer that hired them for not supporting their product. Oh, and the telemarketers.

[Fyron]

You should not apply for a job where you will have to converse with English speaking people constantly if you can not speak English very well. There are plenty of other ways to earn a living that do not depend on skills you do not have.

[geoschmo]

Imperator Fyron said:
You should not apply for a job where you will have to converse with English speaking people constantly if you can not speak English very well. There are plenty of other ways to earn a living that do not depend on skills you do not have.

Uh, really? You might say that here, but I'm not sure it's true in India. If jobs were that common over their I doubt that companies could save so much money by moving their support centers.

There's also the matter of what it means to speak acceptable english. If you have to work a little bit to understand their accent that doesn't mean they are illiterate boobs. A lot of Americans are pretty insular and lazy when it comes to that sort of thing.

But regardless even if jobs were plentiful, are you saying if a company wanted to hire you doing a nice comfortable job when your alternative is some kind of unplesant or maybe dangerous manual labor, and pay you better money than the hard job paid, you'd say "No, sorry, I just don't think I'm qualified."

I'm not saying outsourcing is a good thing. I work in support. Outsourcing means me losing my job some day. But I hate all outsourcing. Customer support started going in the crapper years ago when companies started marginalizing their support departments and farming it off to third party support companies. But nobody got upset when that third party company was hiring unskilled Americans, paying them substandard wages and giving thim insufficent training. It was only when they started hiring unskilled Indians, paying them substandard wages and giving them insuffiecent training that people noticed there was a problem.

[rdouglass]

My $.02 on this issue.

It doesn't matter where you live or what you do for work. If your job is to support / help people using verbal communication, you better be able to understand and be understood by the people you support.

How many job requirements incude "good verbal and written communication skills". Almost all?

If they cannot communicate effectively with the person they're supposed to be helping, all that happens is the customer frustration level goes up. And that doesn't have a lot to do with technical abilities. If you're supporting English speaking people (not just Americans now but English speaking people), you better be able to speak and understand English effectively.

What they're doing with or what they'd be doing without that job is irrelevant.

EDIT: Hey, I actually agree with Fyron.

[Fyron]

Geo:

This about sums up what I was meaning to get at:

rdouglass said:
It doesn't matter where you live or what you do for work. If your job is to support / help people using verbal communication, you better be able to understand and be understood by the people you support.

=0=

rdouglass said:
EDIT: Hey, I actually agree with Fyron.

*checks the universe for signs of impending collapse/implosion*

=0=

Captain Kwok said:
You know most Indians can speak and understand English very well (considering most of the education system their is still English-based). Like Geo alluded to earlier, this is mostly an accent issue.

Effective communication ("Speaking well") involves both your ability to formulate coherent sentences and the ability of your audience to understand you. You might be very fluent in a language, but if your accent makes your speech incomprehensible to those you are trying to communicate with, you are not really "speaking well" in that context. Very thick accents are a detriment to effective communication, and are definitely a problem for support staff supporting users that have no experience with your language.

EDIT:
Of course... I probably should have read Starhawk's post before posting this... Geeze man, learn a little tolerance.

[Captain Kwok]

It's not that I disagree with your reasoning Fyron, it's legimate, but your target should really be towards the people responsible for making these decisions (to locate call centres etc) and not directed at people just wanting decent jobs with relatively good wages.

I wonder if we'd be willing to pay the extra X$ for the alternative to have "native" tech support? If your answer is no, then I don't think you have much right to complain.

[Starhawk]

Of course... I probably should have read Starhawk's post before posting this... Geeze man, learn a little tolerance.

I am very tolerant of other cultures and my statement has nothing to do with tolerance of "culture" it has to do with tolerance of people who can't speak worth a damn trying to take my money away from me

And it also has nothing to do with tolerance of a culture when someone calls me THREE TIMES with an accent so thick I can't understand half the stuff she's spouting.

That would be like ME speaking to a Spanish person in Spanish....I may get the occasional word right but most of them will sound like blather to a Spanish person.

And I was also not criticizing other languages Per Se I can just understand why English is a trade language was apposed to say....uh Spanish French/Any other language with gender based designations of every object and item in their language.


And like I said clearly it pisses me off that in America there are an assload of jobs that would require that I learn to Speak Spanish fluently and with little accent in order to simply be hired. And yet an Indian woman who though probobly very good with Indian can hardly manipulate English is what I'm stuck talking to in order to find out what she wants?

And don't talk to me about tolerance when you don't know how diverse a group I have as friends mmmmmkay?

[edit]And I never said I blamed her or had anything against her in particular I just think whoever hired her is an idiot[/edit]

[Thermodyne]

My bad, I didn’t make my point clearly enough. My complaint is the audacity of the founders of this group. They are actually saying that regardless of the quality of the support provided, that they should be treated as respected credible professional service providers. If you read the article, the Yanks will notice that the main quoted insult is not something that an American would normally use. In fact, upon some questioning of one of my Indian friends, it turns out to be a common Indian slur used by city dwellers to describe tribal people living in rural areas.

Now, while I do fault the people involved in the forming of the collective, I do not fault the call takers. I do however reserve the right to vent my frustration at their incompetence. They are just trying to earn a living. The root of the problem is the lack of product support by manufacturers, but the problem we as callers face is the lack of professionalism demonstrated by the call centers. They get paid to put people on the end of a phone line, and have not been held accountable for the standard of said people. When answering technical calls from America, the person needs to speak more than passable English, including technical vocabulary. This is the responsibility of the call center owner and the manufacturer who contract with them to be sure. But for a group of poorly trained service providers to form a group to demand treatment on par with skilled professionals is ridiculous. Would their time be better spent demanding better training from their employers? Not to mention reasonable wages.

Now anyone who ever worked a help desk knows that from time to time you will get a caller that is over the edge from word one. Such is life. But my experience is that this can be corrected by simply helping them with their problem. This often takes very good communication skills, something that is very often lacking with people who are communicating in a second language. Any recent customer support poll you care to look at will demonstrate the low satisfaction rate. And anyone in the business can tell you that outsourcing has only exasperated the problem. And what ever happened to saying “I don’t know”. Many a time I have told a user that I couldn’t solve their problem, but that I would find a solution and call them back. This used to be what second tier help desk people did. But as Geo has already stated, speed at answering and time per call is the standard used today, so second tier is often just staffed with people who talk and type faster. My largest equipment supplier still has it’s call center in the states, and while they may be lacking in technical knowledge or hamstrung by company policy designed to hide major (read expensive) defects, the ability to communicate well helps to greatly reduce the level of stress.

As to Geo’s concerns about being on an American call center, you have my condolences my friend. The Global economy was intended to spread the wealth and raise the third worlds standard of living. But it would seem to have only exported jobs. This will only change when the consumers (voters) demand it.

[Thermodyne]

While we are talking about off shore service, I have another question that some of you might be able to answer. What do these companies pay for overseas calls? I have a sister who lives in Australia, and a few years ago I called her at Christmas. Turns out that she was in Pakistan at the time. So after talking with some of her friends “mates?” for about an hour, I called her in Pakistan. That call was about an hour also. When I got the bill I almost had a stroke! How do these call centers afford to keep people on hold for hours at a time?