Who else is sick of Indian call centres??

Question

Im sick of it, ages on hold, finally connected to someone i cant understand!!!!!
Whats the worst offender in your oppinion?
My personal fave is talktalk, 20 mins on hold, couldnt understand what she/he was saying, told them my broadband was still not active after 2.5 months, was then told i was lying.

I think the first thing a support centre should do is support its users! How can that happen if you cant understand what is being said!!!!!!

Answer 1

now, you've tapped on my current hates......
take Barclay's bank, 25 minutes on hold, you have to repeat your details numerous times because the Indian taking your call 'cant understand you'........they put you on hold only to cut you off, which quite frankly is preferable to trying to communicate with sangheeta who doesn't give a sh!t why your calling in the first place!!

Answer 2

So where I work, the "first level" of the Help Desk is in India. The "second level" is in Mexico. It gets really fun when the Indian people are trying to talk to the Mexican people, both in broken English with heavy accents, and neither has a clue what the other is saying.

It usually means that the call will eventual make it back to me, as I am the "third level" of the company Help desk. And the local people hate it when I make them talk to India and Mexico first. But huh, why should I be the only one having all the fun.

Answer 3

I agree yet fairly everyone seems to be asserting they are on the TPS checklist - regrettably this in basic terms somewhat cuts down on the quantity of calls. study the letter you all have been given from the TPS provider: third paragraph it says, Take info of the enterprise that called you, if the comparable enterprise call extra advantageous than 3 time you will then could improve an action against that enterprise by way of the small claims courtroom and additionally you're able to pay it, who is going to try this. As a tele-canvasser that's extra powerful is you tell them which you have a sparkling a type of and then your call would be taken of the checklist.

Answer 4

Dont get me started gggrrrrr. SKY is the worst culprit in my estimation, hour at a time on hold then being cut off (all the while having to pay for the call at premium rate) deliberately mis-hearing my question and passing me over to 5 different departments, this went on for 3 and a half months.....all this aggro just to get them to take a tab off my telephone line after cancelling their broadband contract that did'nt work, I could hardly understand what I was being told and who I was dealing with. NIGHTMARE

Answer 5

I had been in London for over a year recently and had similar problems especially with long, v.long pick up times for the calls and some very rude guys attending the calls for bulldog and BT from UK itself while trying to get or remove connections, finding payment details or excess cuts etc.

Surprisingly, I haven't had a major issue being in India and calling up the call centers for banks, broadband, phone lines etc.

I guess looking at things, in India things are much more customer centric and they understand the value of customers, maybe because its still..kind of growing businesses and we have the option of 3 different languages while calling - english, hindi (national language) and the regional/state language and obviously a huge flexibility and very little difficulty in understanding.

On the other side of things, some of the reasons why there could be bad service to customers in the west from some(or all ?) of these call centres could be - a) Odd working hours (UK/US sitting in India), continuous calls for long hours - stress and related stuff
b) young people taking Calls - may not have all that patience in the dead of the night
c) quite well qualified sometimes - Bachelor's in technology etc - who could feel they are qualified for much better things but due to xyz reason end up attending calls in a call centre. The other things mentioned like- accents, language capabilities (the employers here don't take all and sundry!! there is quite a bit of screening in terms of verbal and communication abilities here). Well, low pay is one of the reasons again, why they wouldn't really feel great joy attending calls for 8-9 hours with petty salaries.
And BTW, working in call centers is not somthing that is looked at in a very repectable manner. Its kind of a McJob (not to again demean anybody, but just to drive the idea home) i'd say. For many youngsters its just a "hop on" to their main course/ job. And therefore there is a high attrition rate in call centres and leading to new guys getting in and all your woes with the fresh batch of trainess/first timers at job :(

Anyways.. here's something on the literary side about working in an Indian Call centre from our dear wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Night_@_the_Call_Center

Answer 6

Spent two and a half frustrating hours one Sunday night trying to get someone from HSBC in Bangalore to understand that some thief had cloned my card and withdrawn 4 lots of £150 from a bank in Madrid, while I was on holiday in Yorkshire. Ended up having to take time off work to go into the branch to sort it.
This country is going backwards.

Answer 7

Read these news items:

An undercover operation that allegedly found customers' data for sale by outsourcers has rocked the Indian software and service industry.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported on Monday that its TV program "Four Corners" was able to get hold of the personal details of Australian customers from an unidentified journalist working undercover in an Indian call center. The same writer recently helped British tabloid The Sun to buy the sensitive data on British citizens.

An agent at an Indian outsourcer for the U.K. bank HSBC was arrested for selling account information to British criminals.

Answer 8

The worst one I had was Apple. I called up coz my ipod wasn't working. Now I was an IT student at uni at the time, so I'm not technologically stupid or anything. I'd read the manual, tried stuff that the Apple site suggested and then called.

Her: "If you could just press the start and middle button please"
Me: "But I've pressed start and the main button about 50 times before I called you"
Her: "If you could just try it again for me please."
Me: *Pause* "Ok, I tried it. Nothing happened. It's jammed like I told you."
Her: "Ok, if you could just try again for me please."
Me: "I already said, I've tried it about 50 times and it's not making any difference."
Her: "Are you sure you're pressing the right buttons?"
Me: "There's only really 2 buttons on an ipod and I'm studying how to BUILD computers at university. I think I know which buttons are start and the main buttons."
Her: "Ok, if you could just try press the start and the middle button for me"
Me: *Pulls hair out*

I FINALLY got her to accept that my ipod was broken and was sent a replacement and all that jazz. Which has since broken, 1 month after the guarentee.


The other worst call i've made was to Blizzard's technical support team, who runs the online game World Of Warcraft. They're call centers are in France.
Me: "Hi, I'm trying to get through to your billing department but the call keeps looping over what buttons to press."
Him: "Have you selected the right number?"
Me: "Yes. I press one and it keeps looping through the different languages like I haven't pressed anything."
Him: "Oh, you're buttons are probably too big."

I was in such shock that this guy worked in TECHNICAL SUPPORT and thought that the phone line wasn't working because of the size of the buttons on my phone that I just said, "Oh, ok." and hung up.
I called right back, got an English guy, told him and he started laughing his butt off and told me that the line was actually just really busy.
Why the first guy couldn't have just said that is beyond me!

Answer 9

i was on hold the other day with broadband 45 Min's later they answered and it was an Indian i ended up hanging up then i got through to bt and guess what ..................yes another Indian on the line i am not racist by all means but they really need to speak better English and slower .3 hours later i got my problem sorted out just as well it was a free call number otherwise i would have charged them for my call

Answer 10

I have had this problem many times, my hearing isn't that great which makes it even harder to understand.

Then there's the problem that they never understand colloquialisms.

Then there's the fact that they just don't give a sh1t!

Sky was the last company I had this with, still not got my email account set up since Feb!!

Answer 11

i've had headahces with them, but even though its a cheap option for companies to use them to do support, they are polite.. is it any suprise , you go into a shop in the uk .. ask for something and not even a hello, more "yer, what u want?"

i dislike the whole "hi my name is John"... when i know for fact its vipin or something..

as for call centres, by far the worse is cold calls offering u morgages etc.. they normally ring when i'm having dinner or up a ladder painting etc.

i tell them, to wait a minute...and go watch the tv show i was watching.. normally they get the hint and hang up ;-)

if you get a lot of them pestering you, you can request their company name, i always do.. and report them for cold calling.

a lot of them are representing uk companies, who try to use loop holes by using call centres there.