Call centres and “difficult” accents

[twiddlingthumbs69]

i have just spent two hours on the phone to a call centre trying to sort out my private pension.

id say 40% of that time was trying very hard to understand the Indian (?) accent.

im not hard of hearing, before anyone asks.

im at quite an important juncture in this and wanted some clear guidance on forms i needed to fill in etc but im afraid the accent was so strong I really could not make head nor tail of the advice.

ive since received an email stating that if i need more help to ring them.

AIBU to hope to speak to someone with a basic grasp of the English language?

I really struggle with this and it's made worse by hearing loss.
Sometimes it's just strong accent but more often it's poor English and you can tell the difference because the former can understand me and I can use complex language but in the latter case they cannot understand anything other than simple language.
SKY are the worst. I had two hours of torture last year and afterwards realised the person had got it wrong. I made a formal complaint, they listened back to the call and apologised.
Most UK accents I can follow, Glasgow can be tricky but even then if they speak slower I can follow.

(sorry this is meant to quote someone who called my previous comment ridiculous but clearly my grasp of the quotes function is pretty shoddy)

why?

if you can't understand someone's accent fair enough. Don't complain about their grasp of the English language though, unless that is also an issue.

My mum is one who won’t even try to understand. She is always complaining about “Indian call centres” which usually aren’t at all Indian. Dad had a community nurse came to the house and she spoke an accented English but she was perfectly understandable. Mum frowned the whole time and kept saying “pardon” (nothing wrong with her hearing). She was having the gas boiler serviced and had whined all morning saying “I hope he isn’t late, I hope he doesn’t take too long, I hope he doesn’t want to see the flues.” A woman turned up, with what sounded like an Eastern European accent, again with the “pardon” whenever she asked a perfectly understandable question, then when she left mum bitched that she had turned up too early (5 mins) did it too quickly and hadn’t asked to see the flues.

The only time I’ve struggled is when the line is poor or there is a lot of background noise. Mostly I find people know what they are doing and are understandable.

I live in Scotland and they don’t even supply mine. That’s a really small geographical area to want a call centre in.