I'm tired of call centers in India

The BBQ Pit
101

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
accents are much harder to understand over a telephone line,
[/QUOTE]

Indeed. One of the most difficult are some folks in Wisconsin that sell PC apps to teach kids reading or anything else the teachers will buy.
They reckon ah talk lik iss, and they sound like some Canadian amphetamine addicts fed only on coffee and chocolate. :slight_smile:

"GoodmorningAreyouusingWindowsorMac? "
“Say whut?”
“Win-dows or Mac-In-tosh?”
“Winders”
“PressF4andselectthethitythirdmenuoption”
“Where ya’ll from?”

102

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
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):

  1. 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.”
  1. 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.
[/QUOTE]

I feel sorry for any people who took your tutorial. ‘1)’ above is obviously true.
B is obviously up for debate. Next you said I said it was the fault of an Indian call centre worker than an American cannot understand British accented English. I never said that.

103

No, actually, the quote I reference from Lee is talking about how people in her company tell her a one-syllable name. God only knows why she thinks they all have sinister motives when they may just have one name.

And I’m sorry, but our names aren’t ALL Sunil or Sanjay or Ajay or the easy ones. Some of us do have official nicknames-either Indian or English because our legal names are complicated and longwinded for other Indians. And for the record, Neel (pronounced Neil) actually happens to be an Indian name (it means Blue), which just goes to show you how much you OR the average American knows about Indian names to TRY to tell the person on the other end of the line what their name is and isn’t. Sheila, Rohan, Tara, Meghan, Monica, Kiran, Meena, Meera, Maya and Dev (which would be pronounced Dave) are also ALL Indian names that overlap with names from other cultures. Do you plan to accuse all of us of having some Indian name that may have come within your frame of reference when their names may be exactly what they’re telling you it is, and it just happens to overlap with an American name? Second, there’s no reason for you to assume you aren’t speaking to an Indian Christian on the other end of the line. And finally, the legal, birth certificate name of the person on the other end of the line is really the LEAST of your concerns if you’re calling for customer service. I just want to get a name to either write a nasty letter or a nice one depending on what type of service or refer to a manager.

I’m sorry but the obsession with our names (not to mention your incredible arrogance when you too seem to know little to nothing about the range of names possible in India such that you don’t know Neel is a real Indian name and you think it’s Sunil) is just ridiculous. I’d slap someone upside the head if they tried to make me go by my complicated legal name just because I have one.

104

Actually, Lee’s post complained about Indians with single-character names, not monosyllabic ones, but I’m not sure why it angers her so much. I really wish she’d would return and elaborate.

105

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
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.
[/QUOTE]
They are being expected to provide service to Americans. If they can’t be understood by Americans, and can’t effectively communicate with Americans, then using them as a customer service representative IS bad service. It may not be the individual’s “fault”, but they are effectively incompetent, and it is certainly the company’s fault that they are putting people in positions that they ultimately are not competent at.

106

[QUOTE=fluiddruid]
They are being expected to provide service to Americans. If they can’t be understood by Americans, and can’t effectively communicate with Americans, then using them as a customer service representative IS bad service. It may not be the individual’s “fault”, but they are effectively incompetent, and it is certainly the company’s fault that they are putting people in positions that they ultimately are not competent at.
[/QUOTE]
Agreed. The point I’ve been making is that the onus for the bad service is on the company, rather than the call center workers. They are being asked to communicate at a level beyond reasonable expectations.

107

[QUOTE=blinkingblinking]
‘1)’ above is obviously true.
[/quote]
Well, at least we’ve gotten that far: you agree you are putting the onus on the call center worker for the comprehension difficulties.

Dude, you just agreed you said that.

I’m gonna have to let this be one of those “argue it out with yourself and get back to me” cases. Except don’t bother getting back to me.

108

[QUOTE=Dewey Finn]
Actually, Lee’s post complained about Indians with single-character names, not monosyllabic ones, but I’m not sure why it angers her so much. I really wish she’d would return and elaborate.
[/QUOTE]

They are not single-character names; they are abbreviations. From my link in post 91 of this thread (bolding mine):

In any case, she is getting bent out of shape for no reason that impacts her. The South Indians who get their names mangled by people who insist on a Western-style name construction have the more legitimate complaint.

109

[QUOTE=Dewey Finn]
Actually, Lee’s post complained about Indians with single-character names, not monosyllabic ones, but I’m not sure why it angers her so much. I really wish she’d would return and elaborate.
[/QUOTE]

I got the impression she thinks they are being evasive or hiding something.

110

Originally Posted by blinkingblinking
‘1)’ above is obviously true.
Well, at least we’ve gotten that far: you agree you are putting the onus on the call center worker for the comprehension difficulties.

Quote:
Next you said I said it was the fault of an Indian call centre worker than an American cannot understand British accented English. I never said that.
Dude, you just agreed you said that.

I’m gonna have to let this be one of those “argue it out with yourself and get back to me” cases. Except don’t bother getting back to me.
Quote

I am not a dude and I did not agree that I said that. What I said was that if a call centre operator cannot be understood then the customer is getting bad service. WHich is obviously not saying ‘it was the fault of an Indian call centre worker than an American cannot understand British accented English.’
If you cannot understand that, you need to start getting lessons in English and stop bothering me.

111

My big problem: TUBOTAX has its customer assistance center in india. I have a big problem in giving my SS no., tax ID no., etc. to somebody in a foreign country. What if somebody in the Indian call center were to steal my identity? Would I have to go after that person in the Indian courts? Answering some simple software problems is one thing; giving highly sensitive information (that can put your credit rating at risk) is quite another thing!

112

Don’t have much to add here, just two things -

  1. I really hope for Una’s sake that her CIO gets outsourced to India or wherever. That’s just horrible.

  2. I really really want ralph124c’s TUBOTAX software.

113

[QUOTE=anu-la1979]
No, actually, the quote I reference from Lee is talking about how people in her company tell her a one-syllable name. God only knows why she thinks they all have sinister motives when they may just have one name.

And I’m sorry, but our names aren’t ALL Sunil or Sanjay or Ajay or the easy ones. Some of us do have official nicknames-either Indian or English because our legal names are complicated and longwinded for other Indians. And for the record, Neel (pronounced Neil) actually happens to be an Indian name (it means Blue), which just goes to show you how much you OR the average American knows about Indian names to TRY to tell the person on the other end of the line what their name is and isn’t. Sheila, Rohan, Tara, Meghan, Monica, Kiran, Meena, Meera, Maya and Dev (which would be pronounced Dave) are also ALL Indian names that overlap with names from other cultures. Do you plan to accuse all of us of having some Indian name that may have come within your frame of reference when their names may be exactly what they’re telling you it is, and it just happens to overlap with an American name? Second, there’s no reason for you to assume you aren’t speaking to an Indian Christian on the other end of the line. And finally, the legal, birth certificate name of the person on the other end of the line is really the LEAST of your concerns if you’re calling for customer service. I just want to get a name to either write a nasty letter or a nice one depending on what type of service or refer to a manager.

I’m sorry but the obsession with our names (not to mention your incredible arrogance when you too seem to know little to nothing about the range of names possible in India such that you don’t know Neel is a real Indian name and you think it’s Sunil) is just ridiculous. I’d slap someone upside the head if they tried to make me go by my complicated legal name just because I have one.
[/QUOTE]

No, I’m not accusing you, or any given Indian, of anything whatsoever, for the record. I’m simply saying that I hate it when people condescend to me, and I hate that U.S.-based companies feel that assuming that their customers are clueless is a legitimate way to conduct business. I’m NOT blaming some poor Joe Schmoe in Mumbai for trying to do his job as best he can; I AM blaming, for example, HP for telling its customer service reps to make up monosyllabic nicknames (in the course of troubleshooting one CD burner issue, I spoke to half a dozen tech support people, not one of whom gave me a name with more than one syllable, and all of whom spoke with Indian accents. By the way, I very rarely have trouble with Indian accents; I am more likely to have trouble understanding a U.S. Deep South accent than an Indian accent, as far as that goes).

And for the record, I’ve dealt with literally thousands of Indian nationals in my professional and personal life over the years, some for periods of several years at a time on a regular basis, and have gotten pretty uniformly high ratings for my customer service skills from them. One even invited me to his wedding reception (he was one of my few local clients); others have kept in touch long after I moved to new jobs. And over this time, I’ve probably worked with 50 Sunils, but not a single Neel, just to give one example. I certainly recognize the length and complexity of some Indian names; a former co-worker (of Indian descent) even commented on how she had a hard time remembering and/or pronouncing many of them. So if you’re using this single post to judge my level of “arrogance” regarding India and Indians, quite a number of others are in a better position to judge that than you are.

Yes, I recognize that the level of detailed knowledge needed of a person’s name is very different when you are trying to prepare legal documentation for him vs. when you are trying to have him troubleshoot your printer, but I think you’re being more than a tad hypersensitive here.

Eva Luna, Employment-based Immigration Paralegal with approximately 50% Indian clients over the course of the past 7+ years

114

[QUOTE=blinkingblinking]
Originally Posted by blinkingblinking
‘1)’ above is obviously true.
Well, at least we’ve gotten that far: you agree you are putting the onus on the call center worker for the comprehension difficulties.

Quote:
Next you said I said it was the fault of an Indian call centre worker than an American cannot understand British accented English. I never said that.
Dude, you just agreed you said that.

I’m gonna have to let this be one of those “argue it out with yourself and get back to me” cases. Except don’t bother getting back to me.
Quote

I am not a dude and I did not agree that I said that. What I said was that if a call centre operator cannot be understood then the customer is getting bad service. WHich is obviously not saying ‘it was the fault of an Indian call centre worker than an American cannot understand British accented English.’
If you cannot understand that, you need to start getting lessons in English and stop bothering me.
[/QUOTE]
That post is so incomprehensible that I’m not even gonna bother pointing out all the inconsistencies.

So you’re a dudette. Whatever.

115

Eva, as a sidenote, I also read your post as criticizing the person, not the company. Which I found really surprising based on my impression of you on this board. When I read words like “someone” and phrases like "don’t tell me your name is Neel… ", it’s not clear that you’re frustrated with their employer.

Just sayin’, is all.

116

[QUOTE=RickJay]
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.
[/QUOTE]

This is the rationale for the Anglicized names. I work for a Filipino call center as a manager and we ask our agents to give their real names but make it sound Anglicized (especially the last name). For the most part, our agents are able to converse with Americans effectively although you would still get some agents who don’t have their accents down pat . And we do train them on their accents so that they will be easily understood ( not so much of a problem here in Philippines, as most can speak the language with a neutral accent in a very short time ).

Racism is not the primary reason for the occasional customer asking for an “English-speaking supervisor”. It’s usually a comprehension issue and we address this quite adequatly where I work. But you do get the occasional dipshit who would even speak racial epithets about the agent he just spoke with thinking that he’s speaking with an American (I’m Filipino). I usually warn these idiots to refrain, but if they persist, I just drop the call.

117

[QUOTE=niblet_head]
Eva, as a sidenote, I also read your post as criticizing the person, not the company. Which I found really surprising based on my impression of you on this board. When I read words like “someone” and phrases like "don’t tell me your name is Neel… ", it’s not clear that you’re frustrated with their employer.

Just sayin’, is all.
[/QUOTE]

Well, to be fair, I have been frustrated with my entire call center experience, the only two times I’ve had IT issues for which I needed to call a service provider’s call center. The time with the CD burner, all the reps I spoke to were completely polite and well-mannered, but they kept having me hop through the same hoops and do the same thing over and over again, even to the point of performing multiple system restores (my CD burner stopped working). I probably spent a good 6 – 8 hours on the phone over the course of a couple of weeks.

What did the problem turn out to be in the end? I don’t know, but trying a different brand of blank CDs solved it. You’d think a simple fix like that that would be higher up the list on the script, certainly before multiple system restores. So Neil, or Neel, or Sunil, or whatever your actual name is – for the record, I am not blaming you, I am blaming the stupid management decisions that leave the troubleshooting process devoid of any common sense. And the same goes for the time I made several calls to SBC customer service about my non-functioning DSL line; again, after multiple attempts lasting a cumulative 3+ hours, the problem turned out to be not to be with my equipment, but with a network outage in my local area, something simple you’d have thought they’d check much earlier in the troubleshooting process. (I mentioned this to the last rep I spoke to, who was a woman – she apologized and said she’d mention it to her management. You’d think after the network had been down most of the day in a major metro area, some kind of alert would go out to the staff, so they didn’t continue to torture their customers unnecessarily.)

And come on, what are the odds that every single one of the (Indian, by their accents) call center reps I dealt with over both debacles had a one-syllable name that just happened to sound exactly like a one-syllable American name? Pretty slim, I’d say. And that was really my point.

118

[QUOTE=Eva Luna]
And come on, what are the odds that every single one of the (Indian, by their accents) call center reps I dealt with over both debacles had a one-syllable name that just happened to sound exactly like a one-syllable American name? Pretty slim, I’d say. And that was really my point.
[/QUOTE]

And at the end of the day, who should really give a damn what your service rep is called? Really, you sound ridiculous when you complain about the number of syllables your service rep’s name has, especially since they would have no way of knowing in advance whether you are used to Indian names or not and could handle more.

Folks, I’m sorry, but RickJay is spot on in his assessment of why people with an ethnic name - ANY ethnic name - will switch to something else when dealing with the general public. There are too many assholes out there who will decide to crap on the service rep if they have a name that deviates too far from “John Smith.” As has been the pattern with immigrants to this country before, the more recently arrived ethnic groups get more stick, but the problem is pervasive; it doesn’t have to be an Indian name to catch hell.

Couple examples:

  • My mother’s first name is a very old-fashioned German name not commonly found in the U.S. - Irmgard. She shortened it years ago to Irma, because she got tired of people going “Omigod what a weird name,” sometimes accompanied by mutterings about Nazis; the butchered spellings she got on correspondence were amusing by comparison. This is true also for my former landlady, whose real name was Adelheit but who went by “Adele.” When you’re in this country for over 50 years and the reaction never seems to change, you get pretty damn tired of dealing with it, and you pick a name that the locals can handle.

  • I used to work with a sales rep whose name was Mike Gentilella (not an immigrant, by the way; he was 3d generation American). I can sort of see people getting the spelling a little confused, but he regularly dealt with people who would exaggerate the pronunciation of his name as though they were first graders learning to read (because it’s so hard to say!!!111!!), or who would simply refer to him as “Mike Genitalia” (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not). The problem got so bad that management asked him to just use his middle name instead, so he went by “Mike Anthony” thereafter. And this is in an area with abundant Italian-Americans in the local populace, so it’s not as if people were dealing with something totally unfamiliar.

Give it rest with the names, people. Bitch about the customer service TO THE COMPANY if it’s not to your satisfaction, but lay off the personal gripes about the names of the poor folks who are trying, likely not under the best of circumstances, to do their job.

119

[QUOTE=blue sky dreamer]
And at the end of the day, who should really give a damn what your service rep is called? Really, you sound ridiculous when you complain about the number of syllables your service rep’s name has, especially since they would have no way of knowing in advance whether you are used to Indian names or not and could handle more.

Folks, I’m sorry, but RickJay is spot on in his assessment of why people with an ethnic name - ANY ethnic name - will switch to something else when dealing with the general public. There are too many assholes out there who will decide to crap on the service rep if they have a name that deviates too far from “John Smith.” As has been the pattern with immigrants to this country before, the more recently arrived ethnic groups get more stick, but the problem is pervasive; it doesn’t have to be an Indian name to catch hell.

[/QUOTE]

Oh, believe me, I know there are a lot of idiots out there. My own name has a grand total of one syllable, is spelled with three letters, two of which are the same, and is the second name mentioned in the Old Testament. You’d think it would be simple, and people STILL get it wrong on a regular basis. Native English speakers, even! It’s not just with “ethnic” names who have this issue.

It just frustrates me when people assume that I, personally, am a member of the lowest common denominator. I am frustrated by the assholes who mistreat people because of their presumed nationality, ethnicity, or native language. It frustrates me that the call center scripts apparently do not allow for a modicum of common sense, or that the call center reps don’t know how to troubleshoot simple issues - and I have no way of knowing which of those is the case (which is why I generally pester my friends with IT issues before I go to the company, but then my friends are not going to give me warranty replacements, which HP did - TWICE, at their expense - because nobody thought to ask me to try a different brand of CDs).

Again, I have nothing against Indians, or India, or anyone who is trying to make an honest living - I am frustrated by racist idiots just as much as I am frustrated by managers who apparently think it is a valid business model to drive their customers bonkers.

120

[QUOTE=Eva Luna]
Oh, believe me, I know there are a lot of idiots out there. My own name has a grand total of one syllable, is spelled with three letters, two of which are the same, and is the second name mentioned in the Old Testament. You’d think it would be simple, and people STILL get it wrong on a regular basis. Native English speakers, even! …
[/QUOTE]
Do you mind if I ask what it is?