Insulting British callers
 

A story on Telegraph.co.uk, claims that the nasty Brits are causing health problems for the twenty-somethings, manning call centers in India.
At first I though they were talking about help desk calls for computer problems, but further reading says they are also talking about catalog sales and the resultant complaints.
I hardly think this is only Brits, just the British slant for a British paper, as these call centers in India get worldwide business.
If they want to reap the rewards of the "first world" business climate, they are going to experience the pressure cooker that climate lives in.

Call the waaahmbulance. Why do I have a big frickin' bottle of TUMS on my desk? My stressful-as-hell job supports my family. So I do it. Nobody is doing a survey about how much stress my customers cause me, the idea is laughable! I'm on call 24/7; I never get a chance to stop worrying.

Amen, Flint.

Try having all those people bitching right to your face, rather than across a phone line a billion miles away.

boo freaking hoo

As a former call center employee, I would have to say that I agree with Flint, also. Boo-friggity-fraggity-hoo (just adding to Shawnee's boo-freakin-hoo). Millions of customer service people all over this country deal with the same thing and have been for a long time. It's a job.

Outsourcing is a bitch eh? :D Cry me a bucket of tears. You wanted the jobs, now you got em, put up with it.

Hey wait! This is about those nice polite Brits?!?!?! I thought Americans were the rude ones? Well those paki's must have done something to make those nice non-bigoted non-racist Brits angry... {joking already}

I get people bitching at me over the phone, in my face, through e-mail, poorly-worded Service Center tickets, on my cell phone in the middle of the night (my favorite). I'm the guy that the call center gets escalated to. I get to tell people that I'm going to fix things that I can't do anything about, and then I get to call another call center to get it worked on! I support the biggest crybabies in the world: computer-illiterate doctors!

For the record, "Paki" is roughly equivalent in emotional impact to "Nigger".

/amateur anthropologist

Where is George Carlin when you need him...

Then I appologize to all these people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs

It is a call center for people who are already pissed off that what ever didn't go right. A call center job is really a job to let people vent. Just a thought, in a call center position you are being payed to have people mad at you where as a stripper you are being payed to have people lust of over you. So which is truly worse lust of hate?

Random comment:
Who uses Darky ?

Eh? Lust is bad?

so is hate

Random Response: A friend of mine who is in his 60's, born and raised in Ireland, he calls blacks Darky or Blackie.

Merc, that reminds me of my best friends grandmother(she was in her 80s at the time) in a buffet restaurant, calling the little black kids pickaninnies:smack:

my grandmother called them darkies.

so....no one feels any compassion for these indian call center victims? where's danac? cloud??

know your role, people!

me, myself? i'm indifferent. our economy drove those jobs overseas. no americans want that job. i do roll my eyes when i know that i'm talking to someone in bangladesh about a nissan account for someone that lives in new jersey....but..when it gets serious, and they have to escalate the call to the supervisor level...those people have southern accents......texans. which is worse...a texan or an indian?

i kid.....i love texans. they're so mellow. but for some reason, they all sound like kindergarten teachers to me. at any rate....they're all better than having to talk to people from the north east.....we're dicks up here.

we don't even try to be polite. yo! you need to call customer service....not dealer assistance! hold. i'll transfer you. click!

And the other 55% identified...?
middle management being slave driving jerks who can't manage human resources? senior management setting unrealistic performance goals? Being made to work next to that rude bastard Ravi who always smokes and smells bad?

Actually I do feel compassion :P To me there's never an excuse to hurl racial slurs at people who are just trying to do their job...that said I hate being put through to Indian cal centres on account of my experience of them being generally poor.

I think ZenGum hit the nail on the head there about the slave driving jerks in middle management. The main problem, as I see it, with call centres, and this holds true for call centres in the West as well as in India, is that the call centre workers are held to ridiculous and stress inducing work practices. Having to finish calls in under a minute (as stated in the article) is a typical example, as are automatic dialling/answering systems so that the worker doesn't even get that few seconds in between calls to center themselves after a bad call (something that as a former telesales operative I can tell you was absolutely necessary to me). Even going to the toilet requires permission. These are the things that cause the real stress for call centre workers. It's easy to let a bad call go over your head if you get a little breathing space in between and a chance to bitch about it to your co-workers. This is about work place practices. These people are working in the modern equivalent of the early cotton mills: relatively well paid but psychically draining.

Would you like some cheese with that???

If you could only see inside my head: Peter Griffins old Irish dad.....Weeeeeellllll LA-TE-FRICKIN-DA!!! Cry me a river, and GET BACK TO WORK! (All said with that Irish accent)

Very few get up in the morning and think "Crap, I've got to go in to Fun today. Can't I just call in sick?"

You may be getting fooled. Often supervisors and the better-trained call center workers receive special training to hide their accents. And they have found that a Southern accent is easier for them to pick up than a straight midwestern one. More than once I've had no idea I was talking to India until they said one key word completely wrong and gave themselves away.

Now, who doesn't complain about their customers at work when given the opportunity? c'mon! Someone comes into their workplace and says "hey, you look stressed, is it the customers or the management?" The moaning is going to have the same cathartic effect no matter who it's about, and it's much safer to bitch about the distant cutomers....... I'm not saying they're not unnecessarily rude, but they may not truly be the source of the stress -more the icing on the cake and the safest scapegoat.

True, we all know perfectly well to where 85 percent of problems are directly traceable.

:bolt:

lol @ zen!

I read that there are now classes to teach the call center workers accents. Although its definitely the south when your called "honey" and "sugar" lol.

I try to be polite when I'm venting. I always start with "I know its not your fault but..." then I start ranting. And I end it with "sorry to take my frustration out on you."

We once had our clueless manager make us all take a customer service class on how to better handle irate callers (who weren't actually customers at all, but internal employees who had screwed up their computers). We spent the entire time making it crystal clear to the instructor that we had no problem with the callers, it was management we hated. She kept trying to keep us on topic, but we just kept turning all her scenarios into examples of how management made things worse for both the callers and for us. I don't think word was ever passed on to him, though.

Working in a university library, I had the pleasure of explaining to a patron that we were unable to deal with their particular situation at present because everyone except me (low-level drone) was attending a workshop on How To Deliver Better Customer Service.
:banghead:

lol...good story for Reader's Digest All In A Day's Work.

What the article did not say was what proportion of UK based support calls get the same abuse from callers. I suspect that the abuse level has much more to do with the perceived efficiency of the answering service than the fact that it may be in India or Enfield.

The Police service in the SouthWest of UK recently centralised all the emergency calls to a service based in South Wales. I was awoken at 3 am in North Devon by the sound of some pilgrim firing a high power rifle in the woods 75 feet from my bedroom. Whe I called the Police I was put through to a charming Welsh lady (the accent is not unlike Paki!:)) who asked me for a six figure map reference for my location. I did not cuss her up, but I bet plenty of others do.

Some how the idea has been floated that the call center jobs that left the US were somehow ours to loose. I just would like to call bull shit on that notion. That is all.

No, we talked about it. The manager was in Dallas. And it wasn't Bangladesh....it was ....like the phillipines or something.

Yeah, my current employer outsources a bunch of programming work to a very small company in Argentina, of all places. They're good guys down there.

Although since I'm a contract worker, I suppose technically they outsource locally too. :)

I wonder if having to deal with rude Brits is more, or less, stressful than, say, living under a piece of corrugated tin with a stream of shit running through it, washing your clothes in the Ganges, and looking hungrily at sacred cattle roaming in your living room?

This is the US secret plan for world domination. Give 'em a taste of IPods, DVD's, cars, McDonalds and such, then, when they start getting weak enough to be stressed by phone calls, conquer 'em.

The force is strong with this one.

I work in an inbound call center that contracts with various clients to provide customer service. Our location handles most of the newspaper clients: Washington Post, NY Times, Fresno Bee, those are the ones I can remember. I do not work a newspaper campaign anymore. I did LA Times, but that was sent to one of the three new call centers our company is building in Manila.

Now I work a very stressful campaign where the root cause of the stress is not the members who call in (though they can be annoying), it is the local management and the client! We are given impossible call time and quality goals to meet. Yet if there is an issue that we need to get the client to clarify a procedure or correct information.....well let's just say we're still waiting. The OM is occupied by the contractual obligation to meet 98% quality or pay a fine back to the client. Of course it is the client that monitors the calls that determine this fine, not a neutral 3rd party. I cannot think of any call center in the country that would have made this contract, which is probably why we got stuck with it.

And yet I have very little sympathy for the call center workers in India. MY ADVICE: People are going to be mean. It's a fact. Get over it. Learn some skills to help cope with irate callers. Having perfect command of the English language helps. Knowing a lot about the client's product/service and being able to go beyond the provided script helps.

Mr Fargon spoke at length with a Lexmark CSR, and found out that they had outsourced customer service to India and in less than a year had brought it back to California. Biggest reason: customer complaints regarding the language barrier. And if your question was one that was 'not scripted' you were screwed.

As so many before me have pointed out, all jobs have stress. You want the paycheck, you learn to deal with it.

yup.

The Paki comments are unacceptable, though -although it doesn't quite have the same strength within the UK as nigger used by a caucasian here (as implied by bigV). But why doesn't that employee know and follow the procedure for racist abuse? because there isn't one or they daren't? Back to that 85%

How to Insult British Callers
 

.....although all along, my British grammatical perception has me envisioning this thread being about the way in which call centers insult the Brits who phone in:

You don't frighten us, English pig-dog! ---Go and boil your bottom, son of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, you and all your silly English customers. Thppppt! I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper!...... I fart in your general direction! . Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!

'Allo, daffy English caller who has the brain of a duck! So, we Indian fellows out-wit you a second time! How you English say, I one more time-a unclog my nose in your direction, sons of a window-dresser! So, you think you could out-clever us Indian folk with your silly knees-bent running about in dancing behavior! I wave my private parts at your aunties, ... you cheesy lot of second hand electric donkey bottom biters.

No chance, English bedwetting types. I burst my pimples at you and call your door opening request a silly thing. You tiny-brained wipers of other people's bottoms! Yes, depart a lot at this time and cut the approaching any more or we fire arrows at the tops of your heads and make castanets out of your testicles already! Ha ha! And now remain gone illegitimate faced buggerfolk! And, if you think you got nasty taunting this time, you ain't heard nothing yet! Daffy English callers! Thpppt!

hold it right there!

don't misquote the graaaaaillllll.

it's: knees bent advancing behavior!


link to the script by scene

meh, I got the script from a different site, I don't know it by heart. Not that bit, anyway.... ;)

well. you should. and so should you all.

(your way certainly sounds better, so I bow to your correction)

Ni!

Oh who fucking cares. Life is a abitch buy a fucking helmet already.

in penance I post this:



Actually it's "knees bent, running about advancing behaviour" :p

Wotcha drinking tonight, then, Merc? :lol:

Que?

ah, yes....i stand corrected. i guess it's bad form to paraphrase when scolding someone for misquoting.

Ignore that. Itwasarantinanalteredstate. :3eye:
Please accept my apologies, I was ranting in my head. :D