My call-centre is 24/7 and no, geography does not matter (if you have half a brain.)
Not I.
Ask Chris and John (their real names) what they are doing about this.
As I work with people with particular accents, I get accustomed to understanding them, so what was initially a problem rapidly becomes less of one, and with so many call centers in India, many people are going to get the contact needed to understand the accents. If that is your issue with India call centers, I have little sympathy for you.
Call center work, at least tier 1, is an entry level position. India is a hot job market right now. Competent people do not stay in tier1 support, or even tier 2 for very long. Competent workers move on to better jobs where people do not shout at them in English. If someone in India has very good English skills and is reasonably technical and employable, then they likely will move into positions away from outside callers, and into positions where they can write deliverables with vague phrasing that seems to promise the sun and moon but doesn’t actually say anything or how they will do it.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
I remember calling HP once, seeking help with recurring malfunctions on my laptop. After multiple attempts at fixing it failed, I asked the foreign-sounding call center fella, “This laptop has failed four times in the course of a year. Can you give me a telephone number that I can call to complain about the quality of this product?”
He echoed the same response that he had given to two of my previous questions that night: “If you send the computer back to us, we can fix it for a fee…”
“That’s not what I’m asking!” I exclaimed. “Please let me speak to your manager.”
Sigh.
Your name “Cartooniverse” is obviously a bullshit made up name. You’re a dishonest ass.
The reason people in Indian call centres use Anglicized names is because if they don’t, they’re subjected to more racist abuse by redneck shitheads than they already are. Why anyone would want people to be subjected to hate and abuse baffles me. If you took that shit on a daily basis because of your name, you’d use a different name, too.
Plus having to repeat your name several times adds to call times. Lots of call center employees and managers are evaluated on their call times.
I will say this about fake names. I am sick and tired of Indians in my company of pretending they have one character names and worse that they only have one name. I say pretending, because if you talk with them they will give you two or more names of more than one character each. They just don’t like typing them or they don’t want something to come back to them so they don’t use their full name. I sympathize with not wanting to type a really long name, but they could tell the computer they have a decently short name, but no, they have to go straight for the single character.
Is this called a nickname?
Perhaps they don’t want to hear us mispronounce their name. 
Plenty of non-Western cultures have a different style of forming names.
The goal of customer support isn’t to help you with your problem; it’s to get you off the phone. If communication problems facilitate that goal, so much the better.
God, you’re wrong. Just because your pretty little bank contact centre is the most perfect one in the world, doesn’t mean that it’s the same for all call centres.
I’ve moved now, but until 2 months ago I worked tech support for the 2nd largest ISP in Australia. We ran a 24/7 contact centre, and have recently farmed off our support to India. What that meant for us in the Australian centre was constant rework from the offshore reps, because they just wouldn’t listen to the customers, they wouldn’t follow the proper flows for what was supposed to be done, they’d do anything in their power to try and get an ‘out’ and transfer the call to another department, even if it didn’t actually belong there. And that’s been my experience not only with the offshore reps that my company uses but several others I’ve had dealings with. But that’s not my point here.
With tech support, a lot of the service can be made or broken on a geographical level. Why? Because, say for example that a DSL customer is getting “page cannot be displayed”. There can be a whole host of reasons that cause that on the customer’s end. You can be looking at a call that, depending on the level of knowledge the customer has, is anywhere up to an hour or so in length. However, you’ve just gotten an email saying there’s a data line down in western Sydney. The customer’s calling from Parramatta or Fairfield. If you have a geographical knowledge of Australia you know as soon as they say “I’m in Parramatta” that they’re likely to be part of the affected customer base, rather than spending an hour troubleshooting what is going to be an unsolvable problem, or at least an extended time finding an atlas and seeing if the customer is possibly in the affected area.
I now work in Financial Services and geographic knowledge is still a valuable tool. In FS, we have to perform risk assessment. If a customer says “I’ll pay $500 a week off of my $1500 phone bill” then we have to assess whether that’s a realistic arrangement and can be accepted. The company is going to be farming off some of our low-value customers to the Phillipines, and our centre manager is freaking out, because we have to find a way to teach someone who has no idea of what the cost of living, the value of a wage or even the value of a dole cheque is how to perform risk assessment on our customers. If you’re in Australia, you’ve got a vague idea of the fact that Sydney and Melbourne are more expensive places to live than, say, Adelaide in terms of rent/housing. The dole is the same all over the country, but one person living in Brisbane may be spending more on just living each week than a person in Darwin, and thus may only be able to realistically commit to less per week. Sure, the offshore reps could assess this by asking a comprehensive list of questions. But the point of offshore call centres is that they’re supposed to save money. And that saving is negated when the rep has to spend 20 minutes on an income risk assessment test, that an onshore rep can complete in about 3 with a basic knowledge of the difference between geographical areas of the country.
I had a job where most of my customers were in Boston. The rule of thumb for the operator became, “If I can’t understand him I’ll give him to drop.”
Also, I have some Christian Indian friends whose last name is Thomas. A lady at church wondered aloud what their last name used to be.
“Probably Thomas,” said I, pointing out that parts of India were Christian 1000 years before her part of Norway and 1500 years before other parts of Scadanavia.
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There are about 4 people & the assorted kraut on this board who’ll be able to pronounce my legal name. It’s a combination of letters for sounds that aren’t in most Western languages. I am tired of hearing it massacred so I don’t really tell anyone what it is, sometimes I get asked if people see it on email and notice it’s different from my nickname.
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I’ve had a nickname (Anu) since I was a year old. The fact that you’re complaining that Indians have nicknames is…astounding. It’s not a fake name, it’s my nickname. Dattatreya becomes Datta, Rajaram or Rajendra or whatever usually becomes Raj. I mean, wtf, don’t Americans have nicknames?
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In some parts of India, primarily the South, people don’t have last names. So if they’re telling you “M. Narayansunderawhatever” that’s because they only HAVE one name and the M is just because they filled out an initial on the immigration forms.
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In the old days (men especially) would have a long, inherited family name. At least in Hinduism, we don’t name people after living relatives and the age of death was significantly lower than it is now, so a lot of men would take their grandfather’s names. Then they would take their father’s name as a middle name (this is pretty standard still, my middle name is my dad’s name). This combination is usually inordinately long, so people would have official “house” names of one or 2 syllables. So for instances, my dad has a really, really long name and his business cards say D.S. Lastname (Common house name…which actually turned out to be the name of an Arab dictator, unfortunate for him). Another big reason is that women did not traditionally refer to their husbands by their legal names, and grandparents frequently look after children in extended family households, so sons would end up with second “house” names because their grandmothers still felt the prohibition on referring to their husband’s names.
If you don’t believe me, google Jhumpha Lahiri, she talks about this phenomenon of house names versus legal names. That’s not her real name…so sinister of her…
I mean, the fact that you ascribe all these strange cunning motives to Indians and their names when you don’t know anything about their naming traditions is just bizarre. Why are you all so worked up about ferretting out whether someone’s name is Angela or Anu or really Anasuya anyway? Is there some victory to be scored in getting the person on the line to admit that they are Indian?
Other than that, call centre rant, continue on, I have no opinion one way or the other…
I SO want that generator setup!
Of course not. I’ve done so.
A. “If you are talking to a call centre worker who does not know what they are doing or is rude or difficult to understand, then you are getting bad service. It does not matter what country that person is in.”
B. Call center workers in India, despite speaking impeccable Indian/British accented English, have systematic problems in being understood over the telephone by Americans. And vice versa.
The argument (which was there in post 12, just not made quite as step-by-step):
- You were in fact putting the onus for bad service on the call center worker: “a call centre worker who does not know what they are doing or is rude or difficult to understand.”
- Since (B) call center workers in India can’t understand and be understood consistently well by North Americans, and (1) because it is according to you their fault, you are in fact saying that East Indians in general give crappier service than North Americans, and it’s their fault.
There ya go. I suppose you could argue that B is false, but a lot of people here would disagree with you.
We’ve had this discussion before. I can’t vouch for all my countrymen and -women, but personally I am irked if I feel like someone doesn’t think I can handle the truth. I spend a large proportion of my waking hours dealing with people with various foreign accents in English, and let’s face it, I can prettty much recognize post-Raj English at this point. So please don’t tell me your name is Neil, when odds are it’s actually Sunil. Sunil has 2 syllables; I can deal with that. (This actually happened to me when I called HP for computer service. I wanted to call the guy on it, but resisted - plus it was 2:30 am.)
I just wish there weren’t so many people who found the need to act abrasively toward people who are just trying to do their jobs. Then we’d have much less of this crapola about fake nicknames. (I’m not talking about “normal” Indian short forms of names, like, say, Ravi. Though at my old job, I used to get really annoyed at the clients who would leave me voice mails saying “hi, this is Ravi. I urgently need to know the status of my case.” No last name, no full first name, no phone number, no info on what kind of case. So when they called me back, irate that I hadn’t returned the call, I’d mention that at any given moment I was working with maybe 30 guys named Ravi. And no, saying “Ravi the computer guy” is probably not going to narrow things down much.)
OK, back to your regularly scheduled rant.
Leaving aside the issue of your sympathy or lack thereof, the fact remains that accents are much harder to understand over a telephone line, and that a problem that is hard to explain in the absence of any additional communication problems can become a lot thornier quite quickly if accents are a problem as well.
I’ve had a great deal of experience in talking with people with foreign accents. I’ve got a doctorate in mathematics, and even back when math was what I did, most of the mathematicians in America were born somewhere else. I was in a field with a lot of Hungarians and Chinese. I’ve worked with or taken courses from people from Japan to Madagascar. Accents have never been a particular barrier - as long as we were in the same room. Fortunately, one almost never discusses math over the phone.