At least when you call, "Bobby" may actually be Bobby!

I can agree with the majority of the poster's comments.

I used to work for Service Zone, now part of Sitel. When I worked there we did phone tech support for Dell and Gateway. Our initial training was two weeks for Gateway, and then one week of re-training when some of us were moved to the Dell account.

The difference when I worked there was that supervisors were hired out of people that used to work the phones, so they were usually pretty well acquainted with policy.

Even so, you could tell there was total apathy from those at the top for anything but "good numbers". For us on the phones that meant if a call took longer than 15 minutes, we had to try and make it up by shortening another call, or calls to get our average time down. This was while trying to fix people's computers!

The turnover rates are dismal. Out of my training classes, after 6 months half were gone, after a year most were. When I left after 2.5 years there were two others from my class left working there.

The positive part of working phone tech support for me was the massive amount of tools the client companies gave us to do our jobs. It was impressive, especially Dell. But, nobody would use them. We constantly had people who would throw up their hands if it was anything that took more work than taking their info and transferring them somewhere.

hahaha...i know guys that were sent down to Mexico to open up a new business unit for dell support at a Teleperformance site. I suppose it couldn't be any worse then the outsource site i helped open for dell in the phillippines. :S sorry everyone. On the bright side. beer was super cheap!!!

Its all starting to make sense! Start a company and make a product. Sell product to millions. Outsource your support help and chase away customers. Repeat!

I do have to say the couple of times I called Verizon and Microsoft I did get the help I needed quickly and easily. Dont know if that means I somehow avoided these people or I found the few good ones.

I worked for Teleperformance a couple of years ago in another state. To be hired into the Verizon department you had to pass a very basic computer aptitude test, involving things like knowing what Ctrl-Alt-Delete pulls up. The interview was a little more tough, asking you to recall from memory how to run a series of applications and putting you through a few typical call scenarios where you would focus more on putting things in layman's terms than actual troubleshooting.

Training for their Verizon DSL lasted four weeks, and training for DSL business was another four weeks and only with supervisor approval. You could not be late or miss a day or you will be let go. Strict metrics were in place in terms of call times and customer satisfaction ratings, and if you didn't pass them two months in a row you had to repeat training. Mess up a third time and you were let go. Metrics were not as strict for other projects.

While there were some goons that didn't want to do their job they never lasted long. The number one reason employees were let go was because they were late or didn't show up for work at all.

I don't know what happened after I left (not because of work, I relocated and started college), but I last heard that their Verizon department was pulled from the center entirely and employees either had to switch projects or find new jobs.

My father worked in a couple different projects that also demanded higher technical knowledge than normal and his recollection of employee performance is also very positive.

Both times I've had to call Xbox 360 support (including my inevitable Red Ring o' Death) I ended up talking to someone in India. Who were actually able to help me. So compared to Teleperformance I guess out-of-country-sourcing actually works.

Thank god for the Sprint Consumerist hotline. I love sprint's network, but almost left due to the total ineptitude of their customer service.

Now, thanks to Ben, I can have the best of both worlds.

I was trying to activate a phone with Sprint and the girl did not know what she was doing. She told me that it would take 3 to 5 hrs to activate after turning off the phone and not to call back until after that point if the phone was still not activated.

When I called back 10 minutes later the new sales rep said the other one was an idiot.

I worked at Teleperformance a few years ago (it had a different name at that time so I don't know if it was a different company that got bought out or it got renamed) and was on the Verizon Online project.

This was right around the time where there was that virus going around that would ruin the winsock on the PC and there was a free "winsock fix" utility that did all of the file replacing / registry hacking needed to bring a computer back to life. Having a technical background, I always walked people through how to download and run that program. And I got written up. Because instead of passing off the customer to Microsoft, who would then pass it off to their OEM, who would then tell them to run the restore disk or call their ISP for their Internet issue, I would actually (gasp) fix their problem.

I can understand that they'd want to cover themselves to prevent any litigation (Your rep told me to format my C drive!), but for those of us who knew what we were doing, it was a frustrating waste of time. Needless to say, I didn't last more than a few months there before I found another job that didn't make me want to go insane.

I've work on the same floor as a Teleperformance in Canada for about 8 years.

From what I've seen over the years, they hire teenagers looking for fast money. The turn around seems to be about 2 weeks (with training that might be longer but that happens on a different floor).

We can hear them through the walls.

For my sanity's sake, I'll just copy-pasta what I was quoted in an older Consumerist article regarding TPUSA:

"Poorly paid reps, little actual training, supervisors that really want you to take a long walk off a short pier, and disturbing work environments, actually. And G-d forbid you wanted to give a customer a credit they deserved! I worked for Teleperformance USA taking Sprint calls my freshman year of college, and they hired anyone that could type twenty-five words per minute, had no drug testing policies and a heck of a lot of people doing a lot of drugs, and the one thing that really made me quit was the employee that monthly painted the bathroom with her... monthlies."

TL;DR? Very. Bad.

Very. Very. Bad.

@neekap: Other than the liability issues, many times they want you to refer that is not every agent is going to know the winsock fix.

That being said, person 1 calls agent a and get it fixed, person 1 talks to person 2 and says they fixed it. Person 2 calls agent b who doesnt know it, then you have a customer service issue about something that is not something the account is being paid to perform...

And that's why Sprint's customer service is so godawfully poor.

This is a surprise, why?

aww shucks...no "list of clients" over on their webpage-I guess that woulda been too easy

they are hiring however XD

@neekap:
Yeah, they used to be Calltech, and if I recall they renamed to TP Inc. after a merger with another company.

Companies are so stupid to have poor customer service and, in general, to treat their customers like crap. I used to have 1and1 hosting for my website -- it was cheaper than most, and a total nightmare (500 errors trying to rebuild my site, unable to get adequate processor time from 1and1 to remedy). Now, I pay a few dollars more and have Nexcess.net -- a bunch of guys in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Americans. Nice. Helpful. Very kind (I'm not exactly the tech genius of the universe). Know their stuff. It probably costs me $60 more a year to have an entirely pleasant experience, and I tell everyone about them. Total difference.

I used to work for Dell QA through Teleperformance in Salt Lake City (Which is the national headquarters.) I tried to document the worst call I had during the day but it was too hard to pick the worst. From people that knew nothing about troubleshooting networks, to people who didn't know how to read the warranty and support status on a computer, to people who told a customer who's computer was on fire that they needed to be with the computer in order to get help.

Management 101.

If its a quality service, it costs too much, outsource it.

@Amy Alkon: Interesting. I have 1and1 hosting, and I've had no problems. We probably are trying to do different things?

i guess we're just supposed to be grateful that they speak english as a first language at this point.

I worked customer service at a Canadian Telco and we had a few service deferred to teleperformance USA (outbound telemarketting first and eventually a few others services). Biggest bunch of morons on earth. Not one positive experience with them. Every call about them or transferred from them was complaints of the lies they told to get sales.

@discounteggroll: The outsource companies keep their clients as private as they can. When I was hired at an outsource call center, we signed a non-disclosure agreement that while working for them we would never disclose who we were taking calls for outside of work, and for two (2) years after we were no longer employed there.

The "customer service" offerings of these companies are all based off of the vague expectations of customers when they purchase a product or sign up for a service. Nowhere when buying a Dell PC, signing up for an AT&T cellular phone contract, or subscribing to XBOX live does it state there is a set in stone service level agreement.

There are plenty of outsourcing services companies with excellent call center performance, unfortunately they are generally not in the fields of retail, e-commerce, cellular phone service, Internet service, or consumer computer hardware.

ClientLogic here in Asheville NC. I looked at the map of where they put their sites. All economically challenged with a cheap work force.

My "trainers" were two who had been working two years, both post adolescence and just barely able to complete gramatically correct sentences.

When I was hired, I asked the HR maven if she thought $8 an hour was a sustainable wage. She just looked at me. I laughed.

The entire experience was surreal. God help you if you called in for help.

Teleperformance (which bought CallTech) is currently being sued by their employees:
[www.tpclassaction.com]

They are also one of the worst rated employers:
[www.jobvent.com]

Personally if I call a customer service number and I have any issues I ask if this is a Teleperformance center. If it is, I hang up and look for another number. They do keep some outsourcing in the US, but they are also a French company.

They have also provided support for High Speed Internet Service Providers, Banks, cellphone companies, Apple Computers, and Microsoft XBOX. They are in over 40 countries and one of the largest outsource companies in the world and boy do they suck

Wow that sounds exactly like the pit of despair I used to work at ::cough:: convergys ::cough::

I'll bet I got caught between two Teleperformance call centers when I tried to get some help enabling the world's most common Sprint USB cellular modem on an Acer Aspire One running a brain-fried version of Linux. Nobody would accept responsibility for helping me resolve an error message. At least Acer and Sprint have call centers - Sierra Wireless won't support that modem for Linux at all - nasty surprise! So I am now going to have to decide between wiping the Aspire One and replacing the OS with XP or paying someone locally to write a script to make it work. There should be a solution already out there, but I can't find it, and judging from the number of posts on message boards on this subject, I'm not alone. One solution properly distributed could save a LOT of calls. Customer no-service indeed...not to the end user, not to the client company, just no service at all.

@jdmba:

My favorite one was 'Bruce' with a REALLY thick Indian accent... Yeah, your name is 'Bruce'!

I worked at Teleperformance in Fairborn, Ohio. It is a Sprint call center. I remember that the tech support people who were supposed to be trained on basic customer service (billing issues) would be like "thats not my department" and transfer the call.

I also remember that tech support would put you on hold because they were "working on your account" and go take smoke breaks and what not.

There was also a fight once in the call center and everyone jumped up and threw their headsets down to cheer on the fight completely ignoring the call.

I used to work at a Teleperformance call center, for...you guessed it, Sprint.

I can verify the information in this article to be true. The training is laughable (only three weeks in my case), they do mislead about what the job entails, they do nail you to the wall on upselling and management support is pretty much nonexistent.

Try working a job where you are supposed to help customers but are given absolutely no help from your superiors in doing so.

My wife will tell you how frustrated and stressed out I used to be coming home each day.

Interestingly I stayed for over a year before leaving voluntarily despite the fact I wasn't a salesman at heart. I think though they were happy enough that I was just showing up and answering calls 8 hours a day.

I saw HUNDREDS of employees come and go, I'd say the average shelf life was less than a month. Most would drop out not long after hitting the floor.

Teleperformance may be the one running the sleazy call centers, but no matter how bad they are, the responsibility for it is STILL the company who contracted them.

Sprint, Verizon, whoever, can't just turn away and pretend everything is just fine. Have some of the company managers call in as "regular customers" to evaluate the call handling. If it isn't good enough, fix it or fire it.

It is, after all, YOUR company that is being driven into the ground by poor customer service provided by your contracted out CS.

P.S. I expect your CS to know at least as much as I do about how your systems work, and I expect them to understand and speak not only English, but the technology used by the company. Don't feed me BS.

I actually worked at Teleperformance USA for a short time, and I can confirm these attitudes. In fact, don't be surprised if the customer service person is in a bad mood. They're caught between one demand (giving good CS) and another (speed). Unfortunately, the latter is easier to measure. That's why you find yourself transferred again and again. Transferring counts as ending the call.

Another thing that you had to watch out on the floor was your headset getting stolen. Those crappy little headsets with the one speaker and the microphone by your lips broke all the time, and the ones that fit your head properly were in HIGH demand! Such high demand that it was always a good idea to bring your headset with you to the bathroom. If you leave it on your desk, you might find yourself spending up to an hour looking desperately for another.

Earlier this decade before bolting overseas I did a quick stint at a joint called Call Tech in Indianapolis. It was a part of Teleperformance and handled tech support traffic for Verizon Online and was quite PATHETIC.

They hired anyone with a pulse. I started as Tier 1 (as everyone did) and within a few weeks they pulled me up to Tier 3 (advanced) and had me walking the floors supervising the Tier 1 folks.

I seriously felt sorry for anyone who called in as out of the 300 something employees working there the only ones even remotely capable of handling their issues were the 12 sitting in Tier 3. How did the customers get to Tier 3? By sitting through an hour of some dumb-shit trying to get the customer to uninstall drivers before running a simple line test.

When you get flagged down while supervising on the floor because a tech isn't sure how to get to the control panel in XP... something is wrong.

The group running the operation were complete incompetents although the supervisors for the most part were good at their jobs (former Tier 3 techs with solid computer backgrounds).

@oldtaku: That's a good point! When I called XBox support and got India, I got my problem fixed; the US rep told me I had to call back because "the computers are down." Uh-huh.

@TheSpatulaOfLove: When doing business in the states I use my American nickname James (Americans find the name Sooho difficult to pronounce and strange for a mans name)

If this bothers you, surely I will stop this practice. Hopefully Mr Meenakshisundaram from India will do the same.

How silly of us to change our names to ease communications with Americans!

@Tijil:
"Teleperformance may be the one running the sleazy call centers, but no matter how bad they are, the responsibility for it is STILL the company who contracted them."

True. There isn't anyone disputing that. When the company outsourcing their calls notices that there is a large issue at hand, they DO try to rectify it. It's usually the "Fix it or I'll find some one who will" deal. If that doesn't work they fine the company. If that doesn't work the they will pull the project from any call-center that is an 'issue'.

"Sprint, Verizon, whoever, can't just turn away and pretend everything is just fine. Have some of the company managers call in as "regular customers" to evaluate the call handling. If it isn't good enough, fix it or fire it."

As much as I agree with that, it works only as much as the managers/supervisors allow it to.

For example, an actual Sprint employee makes a test call to one of the call centers, the agent does a poor job. That call will be reported to the manager of that call-center..who doesn't read the e-mail but just forwards it to the supervisor who feigns interest. They put the agent into 'uptraining' in which they get a very light slap on the wrist and it is never mentioned again. They report back to Sprint that the issue has been coached and for all that Sprint knows, all is well and nothing is heard again. There is about a 2% chance that another test call will hit that same agent. When it does, rinse and repeat until someone makes a deal about it. Then the agent is finally let go.

"P.S. I expect your CS to know at least as much as I do about how your systems work, and I expect them to understand and speak not only English, but the technology used by the company. Don't feed me BS."

Outsourced call centers are outsourced to whatever is cheap. Yes, all centers are english speaking. No, they aren't american english speaking. You can't have such expectations. If they can form a semblance of an english sentence structure, then great.

You also, can't demand that they know every nook and cranny of a system. Systems change frequently. Sprint's Ensemble/sView application is a prime example. Layouts and options are moved and modified almost monthly.

Management/Supervisors/Trainers won't train the technology provided by the company if they can avoid it. Even if it takes them 15 more minutes to teach an agents to save an hour worth of wasted time and get on with the issue.

Client Companies are almost left completely in the dark. It's very easy to give them false numbers, especially with the reports being exported to an Excel sheet. Change a few numbers and move along.

If people really knew what outsourced call-centers do, a lot of companies wouldn't seem nearly as evil as they do. Just incompetence, unfortunately at the cost of the client company and the consumer.

I know a majority of the posters here will agree with me when I say Teleperformance is a cancer in the body of Customer Service and I hope to see it wither and die.

@Sharwnthla:

Agreed! I used to work at the Con and my god it was bad.

It ranks high on the Teleperformance customer service standards. OEM for everything, internet problem oh well. Business customer wants a tech sent, sure we'll just charge him $200 to send it, ugh.

When I was in college, I worked for a CSR firm named Convergys. We did customer service for DirecTV. It wasn't uncommon for reps to just hang up on clients or transfer them back into the queue if they couldn't, or didn't want to, help them.

The staff was mostly teenagers and college kids like me who couldn't have cared less about providing customer service. We just needed the jobs.

@jdmba: I'd be surprised if anyone working at that level in a call center actually used their real name.

Besides, if Bobby won't help you then who cares if that's his real name?

I worked for a company that also had Teleperformance centers. The only thing they were good at was making our job harder.

@oldtaku: all of Microsoft's initial calls seem to go to India where they route them accordingly. For desktop and standard server application support it seems to stay in India...While it usually seems to take them a while to fix the problem and may involve escalation I've never experienced them to be rude and they will stick with you until it is fixed.

For the newer applications they have and developer support they have stateside customer service through Microsoft or through a specialized contractor who will almost never give up on a call...but it may take quite a while to get it done.

This is the same company that has had its number posted here many times for the ohio call center for verizon. All they care about is numbers not customer service.

@jusooho: Sooho, I can't speak for others but for my part, I think the frustration with call centers from India has nothing to do with India per se, or Indians, or any other country or its citizens.

It's what they represent.

Outsourcing support for a company's product or service inherently reduces the quality of the support. The goals of a third party independent support center are not necessarily those of the company that provides the product or service.

While calling yourself James may be a personal choice and I understand and appreciate the personal motivation behind it, I think is is commonly perceived as a thin corporate veneer to deceive a customer into believing they are receiving support from the second party in the relationship between a consumer and company and not a third party that the customer did not invite into the relationship.

This perception is exacerbated by the fact that no company clearly states their outsourcing support. If I buy a product, I buy support for that product as well. I and any other consumer should be told at the time of purchase that the support they will receive does not come from the company.

@oldtaku: Speaking as someone who's had to write those scripts the call centers use (not Microsoft's!), you can get a pretty decent amount of mileage out of well-written ones combined with management that can make them follow them.

The problem, IMHO, is that very little auditing takes place by management, and that leads to script divergence. You also have sites like the Consumerist constantly urging people to _immediately_ escalate the second they hear something they don't want to hear, even if the script would have solved their problem.

I've actually had people try to escalate past me (the software engineer in charge of the system), where upon I've promptly told them that I'm the end of the line, and if they don't like what I'm saying, too freaking bad. They're positively shocked by the concept of talking to someone in a support role who has a backbone.

@bmwloco: Well, what did you expect? People with great job prospects don't work in call centers as trained script monkeys.

@Rectilinear Propagation: Gtmac really hit the nail on the head, but I will try to go one further and state that while I don't think he intended to say that support from an Indian Call Center is sub-standard, it can be inferred and might not always be the case. What many Americans often do experience and vocalize (and typically generalize) is that all support from an outside or 3rd party company is poor. Aside from the marketing blitz that infects the airwaves, there are savvy consumers that buy based upon product reviews, specifications, and a long history of solid support and product quality. If someone were to have found out that a big ticket purchase was all of a sudden going to get, in their eyes, sub-standard support they are going to be upset.

In the past when I've called on my wife's Chase card, I have spoken to employees in India. In my mind, the major factors that got to me were the language and cultural barriers. If I was upset when I called in, the rep on the other end was neither empathetic or uncaring; it was almost like they just didn't understand. Coupled with the lack of clarity and brevity, I often times got frustrated and asked for a rep without as thick of an accent. They would comply, although I'm sure in turn it bothered them. When I call into Charter on my cable service, I get some Indian reps now. Nine times out of ten I get the same one, oddly enough, and she is extremely easy to understand and very helpful.

The same problems (in a sense) can be experienced with any customer service rep of any nationality or ethnicity. You as the consumer have to remember that they, too, are human.

@Gtmac: I could not have said that any better. Thank you for putting into words what I have felt for a long time.

@chrispie: @chrispie: Welcome to the world of outsourcing!

It all comes down to the quality of agent and knowledge that you can get for the price the company is willing to pay, and they want you to do it cheaper than they can. Competent people aren't going to be readily available in North America for $8 an hour in most places. And thus they go off shore.

Philippines are good for customer service types of businesses because they are very polite, and it's usually considered a decent job there, but they don't have the base knowledge and experience to make them good technical agents.

Even though people complain ALOT about the accent issue, the agents in India give you the best odds of finding a good agent. They are educated, and motivated to work (depending on how hard the management is coming down on them).

There is allot of underhanded and dirty stuff that is done in this business both on the side of the outsourcing companies (Sutherland, Teleperformance, Sitel, Convergys, etc) or the clients’ penny pinching.

There are good agents and groups out there, but they tend ot be few and far between, and it's up to the VDN as to what one you get.