I had to deal with a call center (I’m almost positive it was overseas) just a little while ago when my under-warranty monitor went on the fritz. The guy I talked to had an accent and used an “American” name. I assumed that this was probably not his “real” name and I assumed that he was not in America. But I could be wrong.
The only real complaint I had with this guy is that it took probably an hour to get my point across. My monitor was busted. Did. Not. Work. Yes, I tried it on a different computer. Yes, I unplugged it and did this and that. Yes, yes, yes. I told him this. But he kept asking me the same questions AGAIN. And AGAIN. He’d put me on hold so he could talk to his supervisor, and return and ask me yet again if I’d plugged it into a different computer. Over and over again. It was exhausting.
Well, at least I now have my replacement monitor, but that’s an hour I’ll never get back again.
Regarding the OP: It was definitely deceptive to call the supervisor a “floor” supervisor when they are an ocean away. There’s no need for that. They can outsource without having to lie about it. Let’s face it—a lot of us are going to assume that these call centers are outsourced anyway. So why lie?
As I read the OP, the complaint is that this company has outsourced its call center and is too chickenshit to reveal that fact to its customers. It’s as simple as that, and a legitimate beef. I didn’t detect any cultural issues at all.
What worries me is that someday a guy named Roy in the U.S. is going to be answering calls with a cheerful, “Hello, my name is Royaswaranan, how may I help you?”
Yes, there are. We avg about $15 an hour for our call agents in the U.S…which is about 30k a year Some folks who have been around a while make about 16 to 17. If we had a more experienced staff (turnover shot up when people convinced themselves we’d be outsourcing everything) then the average would be about 33-35k.
But, back to the complaint: Yes, the itent is to decieve. I’m telling you that the OP has the right premise. It’s deception. Is it unethical deception? I think as a customer, that’ s your decision.
Now companies are hedging their bets a bit on the outsourcing piece. We moved all back office processes first (we image the mail and they pull up the images there), and we are sedning overflow calls only. And if we send the majority someday, we’ll have a large US based group to handle ‘escalations’, which will increase for sure.
But up front and thru the call experience, you don’t want people to think they are calling India, or the Phillipines, etc. I have international relationships with Indians, and we use their Indian name unless it’s just a tongue twister for me. But at the call centers, BAM - you are Americanized for the sake of communication and deception.
Find companies who do biz in the U.S and reward them for it with your business - that’s a customer making a choice.
Wasn’t there a computer company who recently made it a marketing point to promote the fact that their customer service call center was located in North America? It seems to me I remember hearing it lately . . .
(i) The company makes it easier on the person calling as s/he does not have to understand and pronounce difficult sounding names. As long as there is only one “Vincent” in the call center, everyone knows who answered the phone. Looks pretty harmless to me and I see no reason for outrage.
(ii) The company is trying to pass off the customer service representatives as actual Americans. That is deception, plain and simple. I do know that non-US citizens are trained for months on American accents, phrases etc. If all this effort is to deliberately conceal the location of the call centers, that is not only deception, it is stupid. The public will find out.
Deception my ass! They have to adopt a “normal” name to be able to perform their job (giving you serice) properly.
If he used his real name, say Samir Nagheenanajar, most calls would be interrupted or prolonged unneccesarily.
“Welcome to WhateverInc my name is Samir Nagheenanajar, how can I help you?”
“Yeah hi I was calling beca… what did you say your name was?”
“Samir Nagheenanajar, how can I help you?”
“Smahir Nagenja… what?”
“Samir Nagheenanajar, what do you need help with?”
“Well… uh, Smari, I was… how do you pronounce your name?”
“It’s pronounced Joe”
“Oh, well Joe, I’m calling 'cos I bought this toaster from you and it doesn’t work properly…”
I work at a callcenter and one of the guys here is names Hussein. Imagine how much work he’d get done if he didn’t go by another name. Everyone who has a “foreign” or “unusual” name picks something more neutral, not because they want to decieve you but because it is a distraction that will get in the way of them doing their job. I have a common swedish name but if I worked at an Indian callcenter I’d probably call myself Mujarahbi or something.
Perhaps there are millions of ignorant people out there whose brains will short-circuit if they here someone introduce themselves with a foreign-sounding name. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I and anyone else who spends time in New York City gets used to service people with foreign-sounding names.
Somehow Asian doctors in the United States seem to do ok with their real names. Certainly in New York City, anyway.
Certainly “Samir” isn’t too difficult to pronounce. And most service reps give out a badge number instead of their last name these days.
And perhaps referring to the American-based supervisor as a “floor supervisor” is prevent people from being distracted by the fact that an overseas call center is in use?
Saying “I’ll just patch you thorugh to this guy on the other side of the world that I have never seen but who is designated as the floor supervisor” could probably cause a distraction.
And if you don’t get distracted by foreign-sounding names, good for you! Really, that’s nice. But a lot of people do, some people even get upset about it (for whatever reason). The guy at the end of the phone has a job to do and anything that *could cause a distraction * and that is not relavant to the job will be avoided. His name, location or hair color is not relevant to the task he is performing.
In the OP however, the person answering had a thick Indian accent which made him hard to understand, that, is a reasonable gripe. Just like a surgeon with shaky hands or a porn-star with a small dick.
What if our friend ‘Samir Nagheenanajar’ was working in a call centre within the US? Would it still be reasonable to expect him to use a pseudonym, so those white folk don’t get all confused?
This is one of the dumbest threads I have read in a while.
Here’s the thing that cracks me up: there are people that are asserting that “Midwestern accents” put Americans at ease. I actually live in the Midwest. Since the Location field is gone, I’ll save you the time and tell you I live in Chicago. Anyone ever heard a Chicago accent? I have coworkers who, I swear to god, sound like they stepped out of the SNL Superfans sketch (“Da Bearsss!”). I can’t really imagine anyone being comforted by that accent.
I assume this is the same documentary that was on TV here in Ireland last night. One group of trainees were taught how to fake an American accent by a Scottish guy with one of the worst fake American accents I’ve ever heard in my life. I can understand why they didn’t end up being very good at it.
I recently tried to make an on-line purchase at Circuit City. The website was on the fritz, so I had to call an 800 number. I got Vincent’s sister Victoria. It took me over a half hour to order two boxes of blank DVDs. I could not, for the LIFE of me, understand what she was saying. I finally asked to talk with a supervisor, and she wouldn’t LET me. So no only are we losing jobs to overseas oursourcers, but when I stated that I couldn’t understand my phone attendant, they WOULDN’T put anyone else on? How in the fuck is THAT good customer service? I understand that this is the trend, but I fail to see how anyone thinks this is a good, long-term way to do business.
True. So, if stating a call center agent’s real name will make doing his job harder, why not just skip it rather than lying? I mean, as a caller (more often, a cold-called) it’s not as if I wanted to establish a personal relationship. What would be wrong with “Too-Cheap-To-Provide-Decent-Service, Inc., Representative 0xA8FF, how can I help you”?
BTW the difficulties that I have very occasionally with English-language (support) call centers (I am in Germany and much prefer companies that allow customers to deal with them by e-mail or fax) are not about some thick accent but about the fact that these call centers’ scripts seem to cater to the 95 % case i.e. what does the job in almost all cases, and I have already checked these 95 % of possibilities, or I would not have called. Sometimes I have tried, at length and in vain, to obtain from the call center, bona fide Americans (from the accents) whose responses are limited by the system, an e-mail address of a person who actually knows about the subject (i.e. an actual support engineer). We had to take our business for Lotus Notes-to-Internet e-mail connectivity (when this wasn’t integrated in the Notes server, eons ago) from a US company because we could not establish a meaningful communication about nontrivial problems with them.
I used to be a rep, I am still in the same company but no longer on the phones. I made about that amount (I am bi-lingual and they needed me! I know I was making a bit more than my co-workers).
The call center I used to work at is being outsourced as we speak, some in the US, some in India.