If the call center person can't understand me, at all, to ask to speak to someone else?

[BumptiousandBustly]

As opposed to just hanging up and calling back?

I am not prepared to discuss financial stuff with someone who can't understand me. I always try a few times before I give up. But my question is, should I just hang up and call back and hope I get someone who actually understands me, or should I demand to speak to someone else?

On the one hand it really annoys me that I am phoning a call center who don't bother employing people who can understand their customers, on the other hand, I feel like I might be causing someone to loose a much needed job?

"It was not my fault they couldn't understand me"
Sorry Rachel, but I must disagree with you a little here. My full accent is a very broad Scots (think Rab C. Nesbitt from TV) but I make myself understood by adopting a modified accent - funnily enough, what my mother would call a 'telephone voice' . When I moved to England over 20 years ago, I got the hint that I was hard to understand by the number of times my colleagues had to ask me to repeat myself (they were absolutely not being rude, just mystified). It only took me a couple of months to shift my voice so that I was intelligible. I still have an identifiable accent, just softened. My full accent reappears when talking to family though!

Native English speakers aren't necessarily better, as they sometimes don't think (or haven't been trained to) about how clearly they speak. I called an insurance company about something unclear to me on their web-site and the bloke (nice Yorkshire accent) was easy to understand over all but used the word 'obviously' about every fourth word. I had to point out that I'd called precisely because the next step was not at all obvious. He had no awareness that he'd used the word at all. That person would not have been easy for a non-native speaker to deal with - and unintentionally implied throughout the conversation that I was unusually stupid.

And their embarrassment is not my problem either

What a horrible thing to say. Just plain rude.

They are human beings, doing a crappy job, for very little money, in crappy conditions and being spoken to like crap for the privilege.

We want the banks to have more cash so they employ cheap labour etc etc. It's unethical and horrible and the reason I switched to the co-operative bank.

SWITCH BANKS.

That's it in a nutshell. If you're not happy with a company, don't use them.

In the mean time it's not difficult to politely say "I'm sorry, I am having difficulty understanding you could you please transfer me to someone else?"

MANNERS COST NOTHING

why would you demand to speak to someone else? whats wrong with politely asking?

I never said I would be rude. What you said, oh Miss Perfectly Polite, could cause embarrassment for the worker as easily as "you're impossible to understand. Switch me now!"

Bollocks.

Oh Miss Perfectly Polite. Priceless.

Maybe rudeness is just your normal demeanor but I expect manners therefore I use them.

Bored now.

whereyouleftit so what your saying is because someone over the phone which is completely different than face to face could not understand me it's my fault and I deserved to receive the shit treatment that I got. Well I hope I never had to deal with you because that is disgusting.

I have quite a few English and Scottish friends who I speak regularly with on the phone and I understand at times they can have difficulty (speak very fast when I'm excited about something) but I have managed to change that so I'm not constantly repeating myself. So I no how to change my accent for people.

All I was trying to say was that yes you do face times when you'll not be able to fully understand people, I no I did quite a few times on a daily basis, but I never was rude to them because they had a strong accent.

I would never give an English or scottish person abuse on the phone if I was having difficulties understanding their accents, theirs a nice way to say I'm sorry but I can't understand could you pass me onto a colleague.

This post was about if you couldn't understand a person would you hang up and ring back or ask to be passed onto someone else, all I was trying to highlight to people is that there's a nice way to go about it, but people seem to think that just because your having difficulty understanding them you have a right to be rude. Manners cost nothing!!

Wow, there's me told.

Go Rachel!!

"whereyouleftit so what your saying is because someone ... could not understand me it's my fault and I deserved to receive the shit treatment that I got."
Very obviously, that is NOT what I was saying. Where did I say you deserved to be badly treated? Nowhere. But you ARE in control of how you speak, and you CAN, change it. In fact you've now said that you DO, when speaking to your friends over the phone. So you clearly accept that when you have a heavy accent, the onus is on YOU to make yourself understandable. So yes, if you are still not understandable then to say "It was not my fault they couldn't understand me" is simply not good enough. And if multiple people cannot understand you, regardless of how rude they are in expressing that, the fact remains that you cannot be understood. And if your job is to communicate, you are not doing your job.

YANBU OP, I have worked in a bank before and even we had to deal with the call centres when dealing with certain departments, it was a bloody nightmare when they couldn't understand us and made us look stupid in front of the customer that was in the branch. If I had been a customer in that situation I would certainly have registered a complaint with the customer services department of that bank and not thought twice about whether it would cause someone to lose their job, it's the bank's responsibility to provide a decent level of customer service and keeping customers on the phone for longer than they have to be because the person on the other end doesn't understand anything that isn't in the script is shit customer service, a few complaints might just make the banks take notice and stop employing people in the call centres without even a basic understanding of English when dealing with English speaking customers.

Re my conversation with 'Michael', my phone said the caller was international unknown number. Turned out to be the computer virus scammers calling....
Someone obviously couldn't read their script!

DH always asks to speak to their supervisor if they don't understand what he wants. And if the supervisor doesn't understand then he asks for their supervisor and so on up thhe tree. Once he gets whatever it is dealt with, then he points out how much time he has spent on the phone, and asks for some compensation - which he usually gets.

I asked to speak to a supervisor a couple of weeks age. The person who had answerd my call was excellent and I just wanted to pass on to his supervisot how nice he'd been.

I don't think anyone has ever complemented anyone in an Indian call centre before. The supervisor didn't really know what to do.

I work in a call centre and i have the reverse problem; strong accents baffle us. It is very frustrating. Sometimes people don't speak English at all but still phone in - which i find bizarre - as they don't know what i'm saying and i don't know what they are saying. I can't hang up so on and on it goes.

They usually can't understand me saying i don't understand them. So i say 'i'm sorry, i don't understand what you are saying' and they just carry on. Often they 'ask' if we have someone who speaks their language. Recently i had someone just shouting 'Uganda' down the phone at me.

Sorry to break it to you jux but your dh is probably just getting passed round th team!

It's not the fault of the person in the call centre, but the fault of the company outsourcing the service to a particular region. Accents always come over more strongly on the telephone and sometimes people are too thick to appreciate that a strong accent doesn't equal stupidity, hence the verbal some workers receive.

I do feel for the people who work in call centres in India who may know their stuff, but who are obvbiously working from a script and have difficulty in making themselves understood. I've had bad experiences with BT and call centres in India, and continued excellent experiences with First Direct with call centres in this country.