A month without Broadband, all thanks to BT screwing up our initial phoneline installation (we wanted one line, they recorded they’d installed two), then Tiscali completely futzing the reactivation of the connection after…. well, I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say that I swear that the only time I’ll be willing to deal with any company which has a call centre in India will be over my dead and fragrantly rotting corpse.
“Indian Call Centre” is now synonymous in my mind with the words “stunningly crap customer service”. Tiscali gets even lower points for having a Call Centre in India which costs a fucking fortune to speak to, as well. Not that speaking to them makes any difference as every single time we did, we were given yet another excuse, another date or some grumpy Indian bloke basically saying there’s nothing that can be done and putting the phone down on me. Sheesh.
Not that I’ve got anything again peoples of Indian descent at all – we’re all individuals and there’s good and bad in all, and I’ve spoken to folks at Tiscali who are great and genuinely want to help, but can’t. But I’ve got a hell of a lot of dislike for Companies with Indian Call Centres. That smacks too much of “cheapest possible option”; they’re cutting corners to an unacceptable degree, and in Tiscali’s case then rubbing our faces in it by making us pay for the privilege of calling them. Damn, I feel for the folks who work in the Call Centres in India who have to put up with folks like me shouting at them because their feckin’ company can’t give them the tools to do their jobs.
So anyhow, we jumped ship to O2 Broadband which is cheaper, faster (4Mb rather than 1.5Mb – and we even got letters from Tiscali saying they can’t provide broadband on the exact same line we wanted reactivating!), got a freephone number to a UK Call Centre and is all set up and working on exactly the date scheduled. No fuss, no bother.
Here’s hoping it stays that way, eh?
Well, since Customer Support is rather a “feature” in this country than a part of the service that should be included in all business transactions, it’s not surprising. As we said the other day – they’re making more money from those darn 0845 numbers than from the broadband service itself.
Tossers.
I worked in a call centre, doing customer support for PC World stores. It was a job from hell, the modern equivalent of the poor house, so I have a lot sympathy for anyone working in call centre.
That said, I wonder why companies think that good customer service can be achieved by people with strong accents and speaking in a second language regardless of where they are in the world.
One of my colleagues at the call centre was a immigrant from S.E. Asia. Lovely, bright chap but I could not understand a word he was saying, even when I was standing 2 feet away. God knows what our customers thought.
But the reverse also happens. I had a woman call who had a very strong foreign accent and I could not understand her. It got very frustrating and ended with her shouting and hanging up the phone. Presumably if she had got one of my non-UK colleagues she would of been fine.
I think when you ring a call centre, there should be some sort of menu where you can select which accent you want your operator to have:
“Press 2. for Glaswegian, Press 3. for SE Asian ….”
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Lol! Yep, exactly so.
I worked very closely with a Call Centre for a major ISP for several years and one of their main requirements for employment was that you could speak clearly in an easy to understand manner. Whereas in some Call Centres, the opposite seems to be true…….