Call Centre Blues

[patgund]

You know, I don't think this is racism has much as general call-centre and customer centre abuse.

Because I've been called all that and worse working help desks.

Call centers hear the good, the bad, and the ugly American

"In the northern Indian city of Noida, a group of agents for SBC, the U.S. communications company, sat recently on the clipped grass in front of the silver-glassed office building where they field Americans' Internet connection problems. Callers often dismiss them the moment they detect their Indian accents, they say. "A whole lot of the time people are yelling," said Kapil Chawla, 23. "They just want to talk to an American.""

The only part I can see as even semi-racist is the irritation and belief that these call centres are taking away from US jobs. In which case the ire should be directed towards the CEO of the outsoursing company.

I admit, I tend to prefer to talk with someone with an accent I can understand, but that's because I have problems completely understanding Indian English, (much to the amusement of some of my co-workers.) Some of the pitch and tone gets blurred up for some reason.

Comments

[jadeinsoca.livejournal.com]

I know the ire they get, when americans are hung up...treated like they know nothing cause you are female or only having the same sentence repeated to you over and over again and told they cant get the supivisor when you ask for one*....I can understand why americans get mad.
It has nothing to do with race, it has do with wanting help and being treated badly.

*these are all things that have happened to me with in the last 6 months while talking with technical support in India(i know it was india cause I asked when i had customer service on my cell phone and they were asking me questions to ask the person that was "helping" me in tech support

[nolly.livejournal.com]

It's not just you on the accents, and, IME, it goes both ways.

Some Indian accents, I have little or no trouble with, some it's hit or miss, some are nearly impossible.

One of the odd quirks of my recent job hunt was the large number of calls and emails from "recruiters" with Indian accents. I put "recruiter" in quotes, because I was never sure how legit these calls were. The area codes and email domains were always out-of-area, often not even local to the job. The people contacting me seemed to have little to no grasp of CA geography. After the first few, when the pattern became obvious, my first question was always "Where is the job?", and they often had trouble understanding me, particularly the word "where". When I did finally get the question across -- often after rephrasing to something like "What is the job location?" -- it was never in the SD area, and often, they couldn't tell me what area it was -- like not knowing that Burlingame is in the Bay area. I never followed up because of the distance factor, so I don't know if these were real jobs or what. I sometimes got contacted 7 or 8 times about the same job, sometimes by the same person.

[catmcroy.livejournal.com]

I'd prefer to talk to someone with an accent I understand too.

And a lot of my customers have indecipherable accents - what I think of as "heavy black", deep south, Texas, East Indian, Asian (hate it when they start getting high pitched) etc