Why are all AOL phone staff so useless?

Question

The guys who "serve" me on customer services are so rubbish...and i've noticed that 9/10 of them are asian and they never listen to what i say. it always takes me about an hour or so to "resolve" my problems, but it also takes upto 3 phone calls, so effectively, its 3 hours of listening to pointless information and tom jones.

does AOL have some sort of connection with an indian call centre or something, only i've seen the episode of the simpsons when they went to india and it gave me ideas.

Answer 1

The Simpsons episode although a spoof...unfortunately is all too real. Most major companies that have an extensive customer base outsource their support to countries such as India.

The customer support staff will frequently not speak English very well and not skilled techs. They follow a simple script of questions that they are only looking for "yes" or "no" to proceed to the next step. The techs are trained in performing the fixes for the results of the answer tree. That's it...anything more and it would have to go to a secondary...and more expensive line of Techs. Companies really try to keep users from progressing past this step as a cost savings.

Because of an increasing dissatisfaction of customers in getting sub-par support and frustration that they are talking to a person who speaks limited English. AOL and others request that the tech in India use nicknames. Veeruhandah is now "Bob".

The really sad thing is that India's work force has had a huge increase in salary and the cost effectiveness has gone down to the point where India is outsourcing to countries with a lower salary structure. How sad is it that India is beginning to outsource to the US?

At least Bob will only be short for Robert in this case.

Answer 2

AOL customer support is completely rotten. I figure their philosohpy is, "Hey, we already have your money so everything is good."

My mother has hearing problems and could not understand the people with the heavy accents. She asked is there anyway that she could communicate with someone who could more solidly pronounce so she could understand them. She was told they could communicate by email or fax instead.

Also, AOL has gotten in trouble for its customer support. They were sued a few years back by people who were trying to leave AOL. The customer support would take their request to stop AOL and then sit on it. The people sometimes spents months paying for internet service they did not want. There was a lawsuit and AOL had to pay a lot of people back.

I once read an article about the top 20 worst technology blunders. AOL was somewhere in the top 5. The article made a point that they also believed that AOL helped spread the internet to the world faster but their service, but technological and customer, was pretty bad.

By the way, I have had some really good results working with Indian tech support. I had a Microsoft problem and their guy was extremely helpful. Went above and beyond the call of duty. I have had some really bad ones too, but for the most part, once I get past the accent thing I usually get results. I have not personally talked with an AOL tech person though. They may have gone to the cheapest outfit they could find.

Answer 3

Actually the do have connections, as do most American Service providing companies. The Bush administration has allowed these jobs to move overseas, but back to your question.
When you contact the service group the person answering has no idea if you can even spell PC. He is trained to follow a script of trouble shooting guidelines. He asks a question, if the answer is yes he follows the path on page 10, if the answer is no then he follows the path on page 20, and so on.
With this type of script the service person does not have to be an expert. It works for the company and saves them a lot of money.

Answer 4

actually that is happening EVERYWHERE !! I called Charter (my cable company out of Wisconsin..I live in NW Illinois) and I get an Indian guy who I can't even understand,and he doesn't understand what I am saying, so I ask for a supervisor and get ANOTHER Indian person... I have nothing against accents, my husband has a Spanish accent, but being in telecommunications myself, I think people should be able to CLEARLY understand you if you work in that line of work. It seems many companies are outsourcing their phone customer service to India. If you do a Google search on Outsourcing to India, you'll see many links to companies that offer the service as well as companies that do this, such as AT & T, etc.

Answer 5

I absolutely agree. At least the advise used to be free, but now it's a premium rate phone call! One idiot told me I had the wrong cable on my comp. At the comp shop the man told me that was a load of bull and he helped me solve my problem. Should have gone there first instead a paying a fortune to AOL's phoneline, only to get somebody with as much IT knowledge as my cat.

Answer 6

It's AOL.
The only thing worse that I know of is MSN.
They all use tech support from India and Pakistan because they can employ college educated people that speak and read English (sort of) for about $5 a day.
They don't need any expertise because they use terminal support software tailored to any company's FAQ database.

Answer 7

Almost certainly this is an out sourced call centre. I don't know why anyone ever bothers with AOL. It is seriously bad and the software is useless. Cut all ties and go with a normal ISP is my advice.

Answer 8

Most of these call centres seem to be in India. Ask them and if they deny it, ask the operator where he/she lives and how do they get to work. That always gives the game away, and although it won't do YOU any good, you'll feel one hell of a lot better at having got one over on them!

Answer 9

Most tech support is outsourced to other countries. Usually, the "support technician" is just reading you what is shown on their screen and if you ask a question, it completely throws them off and they just continue with what they were saying before. They sometimes don't have any experience with tech support or maybe even computers, they are just doing what the thing on their screen is telling them to do.

Answer 10

Ro Ro, there's a distinction between AOL, Google and Yahoo receiving advert sales (meaning, sponsors pay them to posts their commercials....) and the ADVERTISERS receiving money simply by fact people circulate to Yahoo, then click with the aid of an advert to circulate to a clean internet site. besides, to respond to your question: i do no longer understand lots of people who click with the aid of commercials myself, besides the indisputable fact that it would be occurring. they have the thank you to hint those issues, so i doubt heavily they'd spend the money if it did no longer paintings.