Are you frustrated when you called a company and found out that you've been routed to an Indian call center?
Well, your frustration's nothing to what's afflicting those on the other end of the line: heart attacks, ulcers, and insomnia.
Researchers estimated that heart disease, strokes and diabetes would cost India more than £100 billion in lost productivity over the next 10 years.
Staff in call centres dealing with customers in Britain say they have been shocked at the ferocity of the verbal attacks they encounter.
Nidhi Aggarwal, 24, said she had never heard some of the insulting language used - including the word "Paki" as a term of abuse - before she began taking orders for a British catalogue company, which routes its customers' calls to a Bangalore call centre. [...]
Miss Aggarwal, an English graduate, said she planned to quit, tired of wishing customers a good morning only to hear: "Oh, I'm through to India am I? Put me through to someone who can understand English, you f****** cow."
I blame these huge enterprises such as the above mentioned, who profit from cheap labour! That's where the problem is.
Bu truthfully, there is no need to call them f****** cows. They are simply doing their jobs.
I've had two nightmare experiences with Indian call centers - one when United Airlines lost (sorry, "delayed") my bag and one, most recently, when Amazon lost ("delayed") my order (apparently the US post office is using mule trains these days -- it showed up on December 27 -- I'd ordered it on December 5.)
And though the call people were as helpful as was possible -- and I didn't yell at anyone -- yes, I was annoyed and inconvenienced and doubly aggravated because these two companies clearly felt that the best way to deal with a mistake was to pawn it off on people who were employed solely on the basis that they were cheap and didn't cost the company much.
So, in all honesty, these guys are really just experiencing what we used to. Race aside, the 'mean caller' would find anything to single out and insult you about, and racism wasn't forbidden (for example, if the caller sounded like a certain ethnicity, or even if the customer preferred a different gender rep..) Of course, they probably have a higher frequency of 'mean callers' because of the language issue.
Two of my favorite anecdotes from supervisors:
To a native Texan:
"Your twang makes you sound stupid. Give me someone smart."
*release*
To a Mexican-American supervisor:
"I don't want to talk to you, give me a native speaker!"
"I'm sorry, Pocahontas is at lunch."
*release*
Call center people are always willing to do anything to help you if you are really sweet to them. If you act like a jackhole, they're just going to want you off their line and will do little to care about your needs.
Um, I doubt the Indians working at the incoming call centers (i.e. Hewlett Packard's help center) are the same ones pestering you with credit card offers and mortgages. These "idiots" are not the people responsible for the companies sending work to their country because of their cheaper wages and relaxed working standards. It's the investors in these companies (mostly Americans) who have stamped, whined and moaned that need higher profits and be damned if meant sending work to third-world countries.
As for your complaints about their "retarded" accent .... uh, I think you need to look in the mirror sweetheart and apply that term. These "idiots" are speaking in two languages, and even if there's a thick accent and the English is struggling a bit, it's more than what I'm sure you capable of doing.
If you are American (or even British) do your country a favor, never travel abroad. People like you give America a bad name.
I've worked tech support here in the US, and let me tell you that rudeness is ubiquitous: It's NOT because of some perceived inferiority of service because of communications between a non-English as first language tech and an English as first language customer; I've been called a stupid c*nt because I refused to provide account details to a man who refused to identify properly.
Customer service comes in many forms. There's face to face, over the phone, and via email. Face to face is usually the best, but it's not without frustration and sometimes abusive treatment. Over the phone is worse, because it's easy to imagine that the person on the other end isn't real, somehow. Online or by email is the pits; I've seen more abusive language from customers via email than both face-to-face and phone combined.
Think of the "Iron my shirt" bozos who were heckling Hilary; Now compare that to the treatment that Kathy Sierra got.
Oh, and that guy who called me a stupid c*nt? He spoke with a thick accent.
The most recent example of me being rude, though...I don't even remember what the telemarketer was trying to sell me, but I always politely decline with "I'm sorry, but I'm not interested." The woman kept pushing and pushing, and (being pregnant and testy already), I responded with "What part of 'I'm not interested' do you not understand?"
She responded with "My, we're getting a little testy today, aren't we?" in a really nasty tone and then KEPT trying to sell me whatever it was she was trying to sell. I lost it and screamed "What part of 'I'm not f***ing interested' can you not get through your thick skull, you idiot?" then I hung up fuming. I had never done that before and haven't done it since, and I feel a bit ashamed thinking about it. What I want to know is how they think they are going to get anyone to buy their crap with that attitude?
I generally try to be as polite as possible to telemarketers when I tell them no and to remove my phone number from their list because I know there's a real person on the other end of the line just trying to do their job and there's no reason to be rude.
With Indian call center professionals, I find that given the amount of people who hurl abuse at them everyday, they are almost grateful, poor guys, when you are polite, and go all out to help you.
Even in the midst of my frustration (with whetever issue I am calling about), I feel sad about their plight.
I suspect it's because no matter where the call-centre is they're not able to answer your question. This is generally because by the time you've got so desperate that you're willing to give up and call for help you've alread exhausted all the obvious tricks - and guess what they take you through - obvious tricks.
As for receiving cold calls - we in the UK have one up on your side of the Atlantic - we don't have to put up with them. A quick visit to TPSonline and within a few days the calls dry up to next to nothing. We get less than two a year now!
Same with junk mail - MPSonline squashes it.
People are tired of crappy service from faceless corporations.
That's it. Whether the guy answering the phone is in India or Indiana. Many giant corporations create products that have built-in obsolescence or are poorly made to boost profits and keep stock holders happy and don't really care about customers or employees.
Americans hate this - and then when they call a help line, they end up talking to someone that usually has no idea how to help them because the company is too cheap to fix the issue or they give you the run around hoping you will give up (the credit card industry does this). It just makes people even more angry when that call worker is foreign and has been specifically hired to reduce costs and put more Americans out of work.
Add to this the fact that these upper management people who make the terrible decisions and green-light sub-par products are insulated so they never have to listen to complaints - they make people in foreign call centers do it for pennies.
sorry, that's a statement, not a comment.
@everyone else who complained about outsourcing to india: realize this. the american economy is changing and it will continue to DRASTICALLY change in the next decades to come. the only way you can stop this is by becoming the owner of a company. once you achieve this goal, don't send your simple jobs to other countries. oh wait- it's cheaper.. mortgage rates will probably still be falling and you won't be able to stay in the building your comany is run in. you have two choices: close your business and face bankruptcy, or outsource your customer service for a cheaper price and keep the business. now i'm not saying you necessarily want to do anything about outsourcing, because you understand it's role within its given societies, and of course it's not this black and white.
objectively speaking, i think what message we should get from this is to well, be nicer. how hard must it be for them? some people commented on here that their friends (or even they) worked at a place like this and it was awful. imagine entire populations of young kids going through this every day. how would you feel if you were one of them? and how would you feel towards people who were intolerant of you because you happened to have a terrible job? i'm sure many can relate to this... i'm sure anyone who has worked in the food service has felt this way a couple times. allow me to get off my soap box now... enjoy your days.
This would sound very much politically incorrect but the thing that bothered me the most when I got calls from English speakers (when I was in the Spanish customer service line, mind you, your mistake not mine and all that) was that they wouldn't make an effort to try and listen to what you're saying. I'm bilingual with little accent left and yet when I opened my calls in Spanish and then English most wouldn't even care to listen to the english part before they either hung up on me or screamed that they wanted to speak with someone else.
Also, don't fuck with people who can screw you by a few clicks in their computers. Hah.
Accents: I also had to take over a lot of calls from our agents who had strong accents- quite reasonably because I couldn't understand some of them despite working with them every day. It's got nothing to do with racism - I don't even believe in the concept of race - but if you are not understandable then you shouldn't be working on the phone. (The worst offender was actually a local with a really strong regional accent.)
Having said that, I fully support giving any and all abuse to unwanted cold callers trying to sell you things. I have absolutely no sympathy for them and they should find another job.
It has nothing to do with race or with accent, as most indians have the sort of English diction that make most English people sound like mumbling retards.
No the problem for me is the that british european and american companies have fired all the British European and American people who did this job and farmed the work out to third world information sweat shops.
At what point will these companies register the idea that if they keep pushing production to the 3rd world to reduce costs and maximise their profits by using labour that is paid so badly...
WHO IS GOING TO BE LEFT TO BUY THEIR PRODUCE?
If you take the jobs aay from Detroit, how can the people of detroit buy your stupid cars?
Economic Self Inflicted wound.
My father died and my mother lost her marbles when I was 17, forcing me to skip college and take care of my 4 younger sisters. Telephone work lets me make more than minimum wage so that I can feed my family. I am a decent, honest, hard-working person, but to listen to the people that I talk to every day you would think I was the worst kind of criminal. I have partial deafness in my left ear from people blowing air horns and whistles (or sometimes just screaming) when they answer the phone, or when they call our call center. I don't like my job. I don't enjoy calling people, or answering calls in a call center. This is not what I had hoped to spend my life doing. I still have one more sister and my own son to put through college, so it looks like I may be doing this for quite a while longer.
If I was your daughter or wife you would think that people were awful, and rant and rave about the jerks that abound in our world, but since I am a faceless entity people treat me like I deserve abuse.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Indian call centers, because my job has been outsourced several times, causing me to have to start back at the bottom of the food chain and with decreased wages, but they are people and it isn't their fault. Just like me, those people are just taking whatever work is available and tying to feed their families. When you get a call, how hard is it to just hang up the phone, instead of taking your self-righteous anger out on some poor slob who has learned to cringe every time he or she hears a phone ring? If you get an annoying voicemail... press the #7 to delete and move on with your life.
On behalf of all the under-educated or under-employed people in the world, I sincerely apologize that our misfortune has caused us to interrupt your days. I apologize that sometimes when you answer the phone it is not a friend or loved one, but a bill collector, or a sales pitch. I know that it is easy to see us as horrible little caricatures of greedy villains, but we aren't. We are your mothers, sisters, brothers,fathers, husbands, wives, and friends. So the next time you decide to take out your daily frustration on some hapless slob on the other end of a telephone, please remember what I told the last person who screamed at me to get a "real job";
"I spend 10 hours of my day, 5 days a week, doing something I hate, so that I can stay in a perpetual state of cyclical debt... sounds like a real job to me."
I explain that they do pronounce words differently from the way they are pronounced in America, so I have to figure out what is being said and if they talk at high speed then I don't have time to figure it out.
Problem is, of course, that they don't realize the pronunciation is at all different and is based on both the sounds of the mother tongue and a partial emulation of British pronunciation. I'm convinced that if training included talking at a slower, almost normal clip, there'd be less frustration.
That's where the company you are choosing to shop from has decided to outsource their telephone jobs to. It sucks, but if you don't like it, either don't call the company or don't shop their.
On the other side of things, those Indians need to get a bit tougher. I've worked as a debt collector in the subprime (eg. bad credit) market and I had to deal with loads of jerks who would think it's clever to yell, scream, blow air horns, and generally treat me like a jerk. But there was never an incident of ANYONE I knew of getting upset or having a heart attack or getting an ulcer from the job. You just need to have a tougher hide than most for telephone work.
Boo-freakin-hoo. How about Indian Engineers are stressin out American workers? I can't tell you how many of my colleagues are worried about even HAVING a job over the next year. I work an 80-hour week typically. People I work with have to constantly pick up the pieces after receiving code written by Indian engineers, yet Mgmt still happily sends work over there (gotta get those stock options, boys!) Somebody said a bad word to you? Awww... Suck it up, Makhmoud. I've worked in Tech Support for five years and heard just about everything anyone could say. You can't deal with it? Too bad.