Insulting British callers

[DanaC]

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

know your role, people!

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.

[classicman]

Would you like some cheese with that???

[regular.joe]

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)

[Shawnee123]

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?"

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

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?

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.

[monster]

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.

[ZenGum]

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

[classicman]

lol @ zen!

[aimeecc]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

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.

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."

[Clodfobble]

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.

[ZenGum]

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.

[Shawnee123]

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

[Learner]

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.

[TheMercenary]

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.

[lumberjim]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

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.

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