<p>Saw a post that someone made in regards to call center support from India and USA and just thought I’d start a thread to get peoples opinions on it. I think we’d all prefer to talk to someone who speaks great english and has a job here in this country… but are we willing to pay the price for it?</p>
<p>I honestly think companies WANT to keep their call centers in the USA but due to money reasons may have to move it elsewhere. I think there are two kinds of US call centers - one that pays its people horribly and as a result is able to keep costs down and compete with the pricing of outsourcing but their service may be lacking due to the people they are attracting/turnover/etc - and the other type of call center looks for quality employees, pays its employees decent and as a result is much more expensive to maintain.</p>
<p>I think this is why your level of service varies so much from company to company… If they have a great US based cost center they might be a more expensive center to maintain which may drive up the costs of their products… whereas a company with a not so great US based call center or an outsourced center may be cheaper to maintain but will it scare customers away to the point that the cost savings are a moot point?</p>
<p>Going US based and attracting good employees is a great selling point to your customers which will hopefully make up the money that the company is spending to support it. </p>
<p>A friend of mine has a wife who was unemployed and having a hard time finding a job till she got hired to work at one in florida. she was considered a contract employee at 10 dollars per hour with no vacation and no benefits… they told her at 3 months she’d be hired on board and get a raise with benefits and at 9 months still no word on what was promised so she just recently put in her 2 weeks notice. She said she’d rather be unemployed and job searching then be screamed at all day for little pay and no benefits. I know most of the customer service reps at my company have degrees (if they don’t have one and want to get one, company will pay for it in full) and get paid very decently with tons of vacation and great benefits… but one thing my company prides itself on is it’s ‘best in class’ customer service.</p>
<p>That being said… Don’t assume that just because someone has an accent that they aren’t in the US. We have quite a few people at work who speak perfect english but with an accent. I know a guy at work whom is bilingual (Spanish/English) and has a slight spanish accent (not difficult at all to understand). He says that at least once a week he has a customer ask him where he’s located and when he says PA they call him a liar and start yelling at him. He then proceeds to tell them that he’s a giant Phillies fan, can’t stand the Cowboys, and that if he wasn’t in PA why would he give a darn about our sports. Then they apologize and laugh about it with him. </p>
<p>I’m willing to pay more for a product in order to have a North America based call/support center. I don’t think the additional cost is really that much, if any, as more and more companies are discovering when they find the lower ‘resolution rates’ and ‘satisfaction rates’ for the India based centers end up offsetting much of the gains of the lower wages paid to Indian workers.</p>
<p>There are also some new models being employed in the USA with some of them, including some of the largest ones, being ‘virtual centers’ where the employees are actually working out of their home rather than in a center. This can be an ieal situation for the company and the employee since the company can forego the facility costs and the employee can forego the costs of commuting, clothing (extra ‘business’ clothing that is), and has the benefit of flexible work hours. This allows, for example, moms who have 4 or 6 hours/day when their kids are in school to conveniently work and allows people who happen to live in a part of the country, including rural areas, that have fewer employment opportunities to be able to work.</p>
<p>The problem is often not the accents themselves so much, although sometimes it can be strong enough to be a major impediment, as the inability to actually understand what the caller is saying. The non-native English speaker trained to follow a script can sometimes speak without an accent so strong that it’s not understandable, but they often still can’t understand what the caller is really saying or asking. There are plenty of NA based people who have spanish and other accents but they can understand the real meaning of what I’m saying better than the India based people.</p>
<p>There have been a number of times I tried to get to a resolution with the India based people and after a great deal of frustration with them have been transferred to a NA based center where it’s resolved right away simply because they could understand the situation without having to refer to the script and could understand what I was actually saying. It’s like a breath of fresh air (whoops - don’t say that phrase to the India based people - they won’t know what you’re talking about).</p>
<p>Note - it’s not just India based - I’ve had the same issue with Philippines based people.</p>
<p>Ever watch the movie Outsourced? They recently made it into a TV show.</p>
<p>I think about 1/3rd of the customer service staff that we have works from home. It’s a win win for the company because they have people who can work at all times regardless of weather plus they can save on office rental space. Running out of room? Just deploy more people. They used to pay for all of the home internet connections and their phone lines but now they do VOIP. I always wondered what the cost of that was in relation to renting a bigger space in office… but it must work out favorably or it wouldn’t be done.</p>
<p>Apple is an incredibly successful company operating in the United States and they make no apologies for the prices that they charge for their products. An important component of their products is service - basically you can bring your product into any Apple Store to get advice, consulting and physical repair services. That goes a big step beyond phone service.</p>
<p>So there are lots of people in the US willing to pay for higher levels of service.</p>
<p>I was once being helped by a representative who had a very heavy Indian accent. I asked him where he was located and he told me “a suburb of Kentucky.” Yeah, right.</p>
<p>I used to have Verizon DSL service and Fairpoint bought out our state’s business. Verizon provided phone tech support in India and I hated the service. They usually required a 15-minute procedure to verify that the problem wasn’t mine.</p>
<p>Fairpoint service is US-based and the techs there have more authority to get things done so that I didn’t have to get bounced between tech support, tech support management and local on-the-ground support.</p>
<p>Companies that outsource their call centers can spend varying amounts of money depending on what quality they want. Some call centers in India are essentially indistinguishable from those in the US in terms of quality of support, no accent issues, etc. (a friend from the region once detected that a call center was in India only because the agent pronounced his name correctly, since most people not from the region pronounce it differently). But companies that look for the cheapest possible price get lack of quality to match. Unfortunately, the latter are probably more common than the former.</p>
<p>Companies who need skilled 24 hour support sometimes set up three call centers approximately eight hours apart, since they can more easily hire the needed skilled employees in the daytime hours at each location.</p>
<p>What I like about a call center is when the tech has the authority to make support decisions. This tells me that the call center is hiring people that have some understanding of problems and their technical details and solutions. The folks at Apple Stores have this capability. What I really hate is when someone says: “I really can’t do anything about that; I’ll talk to someone else, here’s my phone number in case you get dropped.” Then you get dropped and it takes you ten minutes to get through the voice mail jail to get another representative where you have to explain the problem all over again.</p>
<p>My brother is currently having a problem with Apple. His Ipod Touch somehow got locked and he didn’t know the code. They sent him a box to mail it in so they could fix it. It has probably been close to 8 weeks now and he still hasn’t gotten it back. They also will not contact him to tell him what is wrong. Customer Service is definitely lacking here…</p>
<p>I get frustrated with the ones that when you call, they can’t understand anything you say. I do everything I can to handle matters online rather than on the phone. When my old computer was having problems, I went online on Dell’s website and got it taken care of. When we were done, I was sent an email with the entire transcript. My problem got handled quickly without waiting and no bouncing from rep to rep.</p>
<p>Apple’s online/phone support isn’t that great compared to the in-store experience. With some of the Apple stuff (especially whole-disk encryption), if you forget the key, your disk is toast - there isn’t anything that they can do about it. On the iPod Touch, couldn’t he just reinitialize it from his computer?</p>
<p>With Dell, I’ve found that service quality varies widely depending on the business unit that you’re dealing with. I generally buy small business to get US support. They switched all business support to the US several years ago leaving a lot of consumer customer support in India.</p>
<p>I know nothing about iPod stuff. I won’t buy it. I just know that they wanted him to mail it off and he’s still not heard back… it locked up around March 15…</p>
<p>I discovered the same thing. I buy computers for business and always have had US support. When I buy my home computer, I just used the same account, because I pay by cc each time and used my personal card. I wanted it delivered to my office so the box wasn’t sitting outside my house during the day. Only after did I discover that when you by as a home user you don’t get US support.</p>
<p>The problems with the call centers overseas are many:</p>
<ol>
<li> The very heavily accented English.</li>
<li> They don’t understand you either.</li>
<li> They have no authority to fix anything. They just read off a script and are told to try and mollify the angry customer. In order to get any redress you have to call someone in management.</li>
</ol>
<p>I was the person who ranted about Sears overseas call center. After being called a ‘racist’ for wanting to talk to someone in the U. S. with some authority, I called Sears headquarters in Illinois. They put me in touch with Texas. Not only did we have a clear telephone line (which can be a problem) we easily understood each other. Whether it was the accent or the idioms that only a native speaker really understands or that I got a high level person, the problem was rectified.</p>
<p>We’ve had terrible support experiences from Apple, and we’ve had terrible support experiences from Dell. One in the U.S., one - at the time - in the Philippines. I’ve had only good experiences with support operations in India. </p>
<p>Best support experiences I’ve had by far recently have been from Southwest Air.</p>
<p>We have actually had really good experiences with Dell support. We live 100 miles from the nearest big city that has a Dell service person and he has come out to our house to fix problems with my daughter’s laptop (replacing the motherboard once and the screen and hinges another time). My laptop had keyboard problems and the wire on the charger split. Thought they were just going to ship us new ones and instruct us on how to install the keyboard but the guy drove the 200 mile round trip to our house to do it.</p>
<p>Computers are one of the few things I do tend buy the extended warranty for.</p>
<p>The most annoying call center experience I have had was a lady with an Indian accent trying to sell me something (related to one of our credit cards, hence getting round the do not call regulations). When I politely (I always try and be polite as I know people are just doing their job) declined she literally started whining at me “Buy why Miss (my first name), why?” (imagine a VERY whiny voice and me holding the phone away from my ear and staring at it with an astonished look on my face). She called several times until we eventually ended up telling the credit card company we would cancel the card if we got one more call trying to sell us anything. It was very weird.</p>
<p>I’ve had some good experiences with Indian customer support people. One thing that I appreciate is that, although their English isn’t perfect, they have been extremely polite (in a formal, British sort of way). They don’t react to my tone (annoyed, upset, impatient) at all. They may not pick up on “tone” much because they are trying hard just to understand my accent/vocabulary, but this actually helps keep things calm. Yes, they are following a script and don’t always respond appropriately. But they’ve been patient and solved, or gotten another person to solve my problems (give me the refund, etc). </p>
<p>(We’ve also had the Indian scammers–heavy accent, unknown location, saying we’ve won a $1000 gift card which can be claimed by paying postage and handling of $1.95 with our credit card. . .I wish these guys bad karma. My son got a similar call, put on his own Indian accent, and said, “OK, first you give me YOUR credit card number. Why won’t you give me YOUR credit card number? Just tell me your credit card number, please, sir. But all I need is YOUR credit card number. . .Could you hold the line just one more minute, please, sir, while I have the police trace this call.” LOL)</p>
<p>Another fan of Southwest Air here. Nothing but good experiences. (They were Americans, well-trained, helpful, cheerful, etc.)</p>
<p>I had LOTS of problems trying to book a hotel in the UK which was part of a US chain. I was out through to a US call centre and they had no idea where the hotel was, or even if it existed. But when I phoned the actual hotel reception they repeatedly put me through to their call centre, who said they didn’t take reservations from said unknown hotel…</p>
[quote]
although their English isn’t perfect, they have been extremely polite<a href=“Generally”>/quote</a> what I’ve noticed is that they use a ‘scripted politeness’ but when the discussion veers off of the script they sometimes get rude very quickly, accuse the caller of lying, lie themselves when they say there’s no supervisor or can’t transfer the call, etc. This has happened to multiple people on multiple calls so it’s not just an interpretation on my part.</p>
<p>All such problems are based on one thing: the US company contracted with a call center based on price and price alone, without regard for quality. Unfortunately, that seems to be very common, since offshore outsourcing is a business fad that is primarily cost-driven.</p>