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?

Pakdooik - you can't extrapolate from your experience though.

ALL Indian call centre staff don't have a problem solving ethos, whereas British staff do?

Really? Of course not. I acknowledge people have bad experiences and I maintain this is the failing of the British client. It is their responsibility to ensure that whoever they outsource their business to can execute that business properly. Wherever they are.

It is as wrong to say "Indian call centres are all XYZ" as it is to say "Pakistani shops are all XYZ" or "Chinese business are all XYZ".

You just can't generalise about the characteristics of an entire nationality. If a Birmingham Call centre underperforms people say "God that call centre was crap". If a Delhi call centre underperforms people say "God, Indian Call centres are crap."

That's not on.

I work in the outsourcing industry and also have to add that in general, offshore workers are generally much better educated and motivated.

The problem really is that we tend not to give call centre agents any latitude at all and at tier 1 level, you very much have to follow a script religiously even if they personally feel its a waste of time too. In the UK our culture would mean the agents would flag this up to management and make a bit of a fuss. In India, their culture is very different so they'd just do it.

The other issue is that much of the motivation to outsource is/was because of financial reasons. I've seen lots of slides of costs, numbers of agents we can hire here versus in Mumbai. Skill sets etc. Never have I seen any consideration given to say your average Indian agent whom may have difficulty understanding say a Geordie. Hell I can't understand some of them, let alone some poor lady in Mumbai!

The management also get overly focussed on how to shave 2 seconds off the Average Handling Time (AHT) and totally forget that it's more important to provide good customer service.

Luckily, the trend in the market is to bring frontline call centres back to the UK though because of the accent issue and customer demands. I think it's also helped by the fact that commercial property prices in India have rocketed, staff attrition is crazily high and as a result, huge wage creep has mushroomed to the point where there really isn't much in it anymore to have staff in Bangalore or Burnley.

yes, niceguy, but i find that a lot of the time the outsourced call centre worker's motivation is to please the company rather than the customer, so it's totally arse-about-tit, iykwim?

I hate it when they lie to you about their name and where they are calling from and won't admit they are cold calling.
I'm with the telephone preference service (which seems pointless these day) so get very shirty when anyone cold calls me.
Yesterday I had "Hannah from Bristol" with a very Indian/ Pakistani accent sounding very distant and obviously in a call centre from the other accents and background noise I could hear. She actually phoned me back after I'd put the phone down after telling her I wasn't interested in her customer survey and was unhappy at being cold called.
I watched a programme on foreign call centres and they encourage them to lie about their names so UK customers don't get so pissed off and don't realise it's a foreign call centre.
Thankfully Bank of Scotland have used Scottish centres when I've dealt with them. I hate having to spell everything.

VeryLittleCarrot - "you can't extrapolate from your experience though". Yes, I can, it's called participant observation.

If I phone BT 8 times and 4 of those are dealt with well by UK staff and 4 of those are dealt with poorly by Indian staff, I have a working hypothesis based on my own observation the UK call centres are better than Indian ones.

Not statistically robust but enough to be going on with

Oddly I don't find the Indian accent hard to understand(mostly) because as a student I had many Indian friends. Granted, their accent was a lot more refined given that this was Cambridge;)TBH, I've had pathetic experiences with the UK staff as well. I think, irrespective of nationality, some of those guys just don't know their arse from their face, don't mind my french!

I tend to hang up with a "Oh, sorry, will call later" if faced with outsourced call centres as I have never found them to be helpful, as one tiny deviation from their script sends everything pearshaped. And neither of us can understand each other, which is worsened by my hearing problems and a usually quite crap line. Because they will make you faff on the line for over an hour then just as you are seemingly getting somewhere, you will get cut off.

Yes, well-known currently-being-investigated-by OFCOM telecommunications fucknugget shyster company, I am mainly talking about YOU .

true, but in my experience if you ask an outsourced call centre worker if you can speak to their manager they will move heaven and earth to stop it, whereas UK staff know that the gig is up.
and again, (based purely on my experiences with various call centres), if you do manage to persist and get through to a manager in India, they are often men who really do not like being called for by a woman. whereas in the uk, you're more likely to get someone (man or woman, but more likely ime woman) who is inclined to want to help so that you don't take the problem further.

YABU to specify 'Indian' call centre, many companies are finding less value for money there now and shifting call centres to Malaysia, the Philippines, etc. How do you know it's an Indian call centre?

YANBU to think companies don't give a rat's ass about customer service these days

You seriously don't want to get involved with the combination of Santander and a foreign call centre.

Virgin TV, broadband and house phone all went down the day before yesterday. Used my non-Virgin pay as you go mobile to phone Virgin to investigate the fault. Spent ten minutes punching in number choices and passwords before finally reaching a call-handler with an Indian accent - and spent a bit longer verifying who I was. Didn't really get much out of the call - he said it was a fault in the area (although he never mentioned my local area by name) - and couldn't give any estimate of when it would be fixed. Definitely got the impression he was working to some "fob them off with this" script - not convinced he checked any info at all. Thankfully it was fixed the following day and I must say Virgin in this area rarely goes down - just as well as I wouldn't like to rely on the call centre for help or info.

Padooik

If those four good experience happened to be with men, and the four bad with women, would you have concluded that men are better than women?

yes, in that role, vlc. i think that would be a reasonable conclusion.

The Santander call centre operative refused to deviate from the script and refused to refer me higher up. The simply kept saying "your card was sent out on X date". I tried to point out that what their screen said had happened and what had actually physically happened was not the same and that they could' possibly tell that an actual card had been put in an envelope and posted. Sadly, another fault of the foreign call centre is that they don't understand the nuances of sarcasm and humour.

The letter I wrote to Santander complaints dept yielded immediate results and proved that the multiple replacement cards had never been sent out due to a bizarre system fault.

(and FWIW, the men and women were equally bad at this. The English Santander woman who fixed it was marvellous. Thus all English women are superior)

I loathe and despise cunting bt.

Party on the 7th of august when I am out of contract with the useless fuckers.

All invited.

dreamingbohemian < How do you know it's an Indian call centre?>

Because I asked.

I agree. I have no issue where someone is from or how they speak or anything apart from - can you solve my problem? I find that, outside the UK, the answer is usually "no" because of all the draned scripted schpeil they give you

God but has anyone had to deal with the utter morons that call themselves Talktalk?? I have changed to BT after Talktalk got my address wrong when I moved house, and after I had waited an hour and a half on hold was REFUSED access to the account because I couldn't tell them my address!! I ended up trying to guess the number of the street that they had got (and they even went into the neighbour's house to try and fit the bloody thing). Again, funny in theory but in reality

I dislike the current trend that makes it acceptable for otherwise completely non-racist people to declare "I hate Indian call centres".

Another closet racist that can't think about other countries without thinking about race.

We're not saying people in India are less intelligent. Call centers in India and other countries are used because they can be staffed and run cheaply. Like anything based on cheapness you will get a poor quality result

Very...No economics doesn't equal exploitation, it means, in your case, giving work to people abroad rather than the thousands unemployed here. Hope you never moan about the state of the UK.

onager......I agree. Seems to me people can't say anything without being accused of being racist.

Onager - Am I the "closet racist" you are referring to? Have you ever read my posts? Can you recall a thread where I agreed with your position very recently about people's position on defining people based on their genetics?

Oh.
My.
God.

I am horrified.

Most of my posts concerning race have ALWAYS been about how people throw "racist" out as a label too easily.

That doesn't make it OK to say "Indian call centres are crap".

Please, Onager, retract and apologise. Closet racist. Do you know how offensive I find that? I'm shaking.

I'm off out now. Thought you were a reasonable poster Onager, but that was so upsetting that I'm going to have to take a break from this.

To remind you again - I have worked with some bloody brilliant Indian call centres, so I am justifiably aggrieved when people generalise in a derogatory way like this.

don't fret, vlc, i think that onagar wasn't referring to you specifically, more the MN trend that means that no-one can speak about race etc. at least that's how i read it. (while i appreciate that is not the way it must read to you).