To hate Indian call centres

[Pakdooik]

I've been dealing with BT to sort out a billing problem. When you phone it's a lottery whether you get the UK or India. The Indian staff were extremely polite, extremely friendly and totally effin useless - politely telling me that I was mistaken, that I couldn't speak to a supervisor and that the computer was infallible. That's an hour of my time I won't get back.

The UK staff are reasonably polite, not too friendly and sorted the problem out in five minutes.

Is it to do with not losing face?

Suesylvester - not sure how I'd go about proving it!

I know this as I used to work at said call centre, and still live in the town in question.

we hate BT here. DH has had awful problems with them with work......

wowee.
So maybe the woman I was speaking to really could guarantee I'd get my filters... maybe she's driving them round my house?

YABU

What you hate is poor customer service and inadequately equipped staff. The nationality of the call centre is irrelevant. I set up two Indian call centre programmes for a company once, and they outperformed the British call centres, which generally had less qualified agents. However we only allowed well trained candidates onto the programmes, whose level of spoken English and comprehension was excellent. And as the client, I lived and worked in India with the call centres to fix problems arising from cultural differences, communication issues or training.

If BT are using sub-standard service providers and not equipping them or supporting them to deal with your calls well, then the problem lies with BT.

I dislike the current trend that makes it acceptable for otherwise completely non-racist people to declare "I hate Indian call centres". Sweeping generalisations are prone to be very unfair.

There's nothing worse than having to tell someone that you do not understand their English, that 'moving forward' is not the best phrase to use when you are clearly dismissing everything the customer has just said and 'I understand' is overused.

YANBU. I have a theory that companies use foreign call centres because irritated customers are more likely to lose the will to live and give up.

Verylittle..... I have yet to find any 'forrin' call centre staff useful at all and if customer service is the call centre's purpose why set up in India? Why not employ people in this country instead of exploiting people in India?

@Mitzy, write them a letter!

IMO you are being unreasonable. The problem is with BT and the call centre is incidental. DH used to work at BT in London setting up their broadband service. It was a right hand does not know what the left does situation at all times. Throw jn loads of money and managerial hierarchies that could pass the buck around till the cows came home and that is BT for you. He left in a year as he had never worked for a crappier organisation. National rail is also based out of jndia and they are smooth and efficient in resolving issues. So are HSBC and RBS.

Exploiting? Are you kidding me? This is a profession that graduates aspire to, well paid with a proper career path and prospects. For men and women. I was really impressed.

It was wonderful and a privilege to work with intelligent, motivated people who loved their jobs and were well looked after by their companies. The people I worked with were superb. I am well aware that other British companies do not ensure the same quality from their overseas vendors.

Halifax is ridiculous, they had me standing in the branch and ringing their call centre on a branch telephone!

Hmm.....so why India and not Britain? If not economics?

I had trouble with HSBC and indian call centres. It's purely down to language though, as everyone on here has said, they are very polite and clearly trying to help, it's just the language barrier and sometimes as a result the speed of the call. I had bought eggs and bananas in Tesco and got called up to the security desk as a call came in about using my card (heaven knows why - used to work in events and have to go abroad a lot with no notice which HSBC couldn't handle and had just got back from Barcelona which may have been why). Lovely lady from India asked me where I was born. I told her the City. She replied "more specific please". Bit I told her the hospital. "More specific please" she cooed. At this point I had to explain I didn't know the ward number or bed and therefore I could help her no further. Ended up having to do a list of about 10 questions as a result! Took me an hour and a half in total to buy bananas and a pack of eggs. Not impressed.

I find it hard to understand a lot of them. Their English is far better than my Indian, I know, but if you are going to phone people surely you must have an undersandable accent!

It's not a case of being racist - it's more to do with (in my case) a complete misunderstanding of the problem(s) and, maybe to do with the targets the staff might be on to solve problems, an unrealistic understanding of the wider issues, which is - whatever country it might be outisde of the UK - a cultural difference.

I didn't tell you everything she said to me. When she rang yesterday to check if the filters had arrived it was at 5pm, although she'd said she would ring between 7 and 8 which I'd said would be more convenient. When I said this to her (as I was rushing out to get the dcs) she said 'OK I will ring back at 8 and hopefully the filters will have arrived by then". It might seem like nit-picking but this kind of things adds to the stress of the caller, when they are already wound up by things going wrong.

and of course this was on top of the original phone call and the two replies that completely contradicted one another.

Can I moan about TalkTalk's Indian call centre? Broadband just died, agent kept telling me about services and equipment I do not have and they think I do, eventually he said I had not paid the bill and that's why it was cut off! Bollocks - I pay by DD!!

When challenged he said (in an impenetrable accent) something I worked out to be "encryption at the exchange". When I said "What's this bullshit about not paying my bill?" I got cut off and behold - my broadband came back on!

I used to be a manager in a call centre (BT, in Scotland not India) and had more than one customer ask me why I had moved out to India to work in a call centre...trying to convince them otherwise was useless.

Anyway. The problem is not that the centre is based outwith the UK, the problem is the sheer lack of training given to operators.

An example - we used a cheap crap courier service to deliver goods to customers. People would call up very angry saying their goods were late or had been delivered to the wrong address etc, and would ask us who the courier were and for their phone number.

The guidelines we were given were - we were not allowed to say who the couriers were nor give out their phone number. We had to take the issue on for the customer but the timescale for this was 8-10 days!!!

The whole system is madness . Nobody has a jot more training than is required to operate in their own department, to the point where quite often when a customer had an issue that we could not help with, we didn't know who to put them in touch with, nor did we have the phone numbers for these other departments.

Customers never believed that, always thought we were not giving out information, but we were not given it in the first place.

Taking ownership of a customer's problem under there circumstances in a virtual impossibility.

I can see that Foxy, it's so hard to be transferred from department to department.

I ended up going round in circles, the department would 'put me through' to the main menu again!

Crapola - yes economics, and quality and performance.
But you know that economics doesn't equal exploitation obviously!

vlc, how do you gauge 'out-performing'? i find that indian call centre workers are more likely to want to protect the interests of the company, at the expense of the actual customer. haven't had any dealings with BT but that was certainly the case at Dell. I pretty much had to email Michael Dell to get satisfaction there.

VeryLittleCarrot - I accept that the Indian staff are better qualified and have excellent English language and comprehension skills. They may even be better trained in call handling - what they don't have is a problem solving ethos or the authority to go outside the boundaries of their systems and scripts.

My problem was solved when the creative woman in Scotland said "I wonder if xxx has happened - I'll look and check." XXX was exactly the problem which she was able to fix very quickly and simply. The Indian staff - all four of them - hadn't the nouse or the training to identify the problem.

The problem lies with managers who do not value the skills needed by front-line customer service staff.

The opinion seems to be that 'anyone' can be trained to deal with a phone query if they are given the right script/flow-chart. Hence the confusion when you, the caller, ask a question requiring thought/initiative.

I'm sure that contracted-out call centre work is great for the company balance sheet in the short term, but otherwise a false economy.

Loads of key performance indicators, Aitch. Complaints percentages, escalations, customer surveys, customer satisfaction ratings, technological problems. We recorded and listened to calls. Every complaint was listened to not only by the call centre, but by us, the clients. Calls were listened to live, and random recordings were listened to and graded. The agents got feedback on every call that was listened to. We amended training and addressed performance. Everything was measured. Vendors competed against each other, and I have to say, The Indian call centres usually outperformed the Merseyside ones.

I'm pretty sure this is not the approach many clients take.

I rang BT with a problem and quoted my account number from my latest bill only to be told 'this is not a BT account number' i say 'yes it is I am reading it off the latest bill, I have been with you for many years' - he says 'this is an old type number, i am not trained in old type accounts and cannot help you' and he puts the phone down.
What !!! it's only a bloody number

I have had run-ins with Indian call centres used by HSBC and Norwich Union/Aviva. To be fair, the Aviva people I spoke to from the UK and India were all lacking in customer care skills. However, I was dealing with a small car claim, and the seeming lack of cultural/geographical understanding of the situation of the accident, and the type of place I live in, made getting my point across very difficult and stressful, when I was already stressed from having had an accident in my car. This was compounded by a bad line, and having to spell out every single proper noun using the phonetic alphabet.

The HSBC one has the same bad line/consistent need for the bloody IPA problem, as well as the operators seem to want to defeat you rather than help you, as someone else said. I know for a fact that HSBC knows my correct postcode, as I have had correctly addressed mail delivered to me for years. Twice, I have tried to pre-arrange large purchases on my card, to be turned down for apparently not knowing my own postcode, as both operators swore blind it was something else - it was a Reading postcode that sounded like some other code that came up for my account. I have never lived in Reading.