Depicted in the photo are two foreign influences: Carrot Top, of the Sasquatch type, and Dora the Explorer, of the illegal immigration kind.

/I kid. But only about Dora. Carrot Top has to be some kind of mythical alien/yeti.

Part of me wonders if that Indian teen was just being diplomatic and, more specifically, absolutely everybody there hates dealing with American callers.

that's 'cuz as soon as an American speaks to anyone that is foreign, or just looks foreign or that they think is foreign, they talk down to them.

I am of Asian decent but born and raised in the U.S. I was at a wedding and at the reception, I entered the main room and held the door open for a couple behind me. The lady turns to me thinking I was a doorman or waiter and starts complaining about how unclean the bathroom is and how I better get someone in there to clean it.

I can't help but wonder if this will mean a descent back into even more labyrinthine phone trees, since this will likely mean greater expense for the hope of reaching a live person...

@mrdeeno: Yes, you have spoken to every "american" to verify that view.

@mrdeeno: I would have smacked her.

That's just uncalled for.
So is the smacking, maybe. But that urge would be there.

@mrdeeno:
Wow. Nice racist, stereotyping comment complaining about racism and stereotyping. You could blow Nomad with that kind of logic loop.

@RandomHookup: Wow. Please leave now. You can pick up your white suit and pointy hat at the coat check.

I personally don't mind speaking to a foreign call center - their English is usually "good enough".

The real problem is that they seem less empowered to actually deal with problems and tend to read from scripts more than their American counterparts (YMMV). If you need to escalate your issue, the problem can be even more complex as they try routing you to another call center back in the States.

@mrdeeno: I'm not American.

When I called THREE times to close an American Express account, and talked to 3 different reps with Indian accent, NOTHING was done. And I had a lot of trouble understanding what they were telling me.

I had to find courtesy phone # for French CSR, so I could least talk to someone in North America. Only then, my request was understood and fulfilled.

I don't care where CSR comes from, or where CSR is located. If you work on the phone, than your accent has to be minimal, so anyone can understand you. Heavy accent = poor customer service.

@Murph1908: This is not all americans, only a select group. When I worked at a call center in Canada that handled American customers, I only had a few people adamantly refuse to speak to a Canadian and demand to be transferred to an American center.

Most would gladly take a Canadian over an Indian any day of the week.

Interestingly, the call center in question employed a lot of immigrants, including an Indian immigrant who sat two seats down from. He would get so much flack from customers thinking they had been sent overseas when in fact he was in Canada. He spoke fluent english as well, albeit with an Indian accent.

One of my favourite bigotry stories was the one about customer who went off on one of our reps for not being able to speak english properly. The rep in question was an immigrant born and raised in: England.

@pecan 3.14159265: Yeah, and he only gets scarier. I believe he has been gaining power the longer he is exposed to our yellow sun. Asuuming that he landed here soon before his hit movie, "Chairman of the Board",

after 10 years of absorbing the energy from sol, he has transformed into this:

@deadandy: Repatriating call centers isn't likely to fix this. Companies recognizing that solving customer issues costs less and/or may be profitable is the cure here.

@unobservant: methinks that Indian teen was the equivalent of "area man". I used to work at a helpdesk for a small business...I got sick of everyone calling and I knew them all.

@mrdeeno: Also, I would tell that women to ''f@ck off, racist hag''. But I have zero tolerance for idiocy in public places. And the look on her face would be priceless X-)

absolutely everybody hates dealing with foreign call centers.......As Delta chief Richard Anderson succinctly put it: "Customer acceptance of call-center representatives in other countries was low, and our customers are not shy about letting us have that feedback."
------------

Good to hear it. Outsourcing needed jobs to third world countries where the people can't speak English clearly was always a bad idea and I'm glad it has come back to bite companies in the arse.

@mrdeeno: Suck it up. Asian countries are notoriously racist towards any group that aren't the right kind of asian.

This is one of the reasons a large call center was set up in Israel. The living wage is lower, so the companies got a break, new citizens were able to get jobs, spoke fluent English and were able to understand American frustration.

From what I've seen people in foreign call centers are usually more polite and courteous.

The hardest time I have ever had understanding someone I was on the phone with, the call center -- or at least the employee -- seemed to be in the American deep South. I have no problem with accents in general but she was talking as if she'd jammed an entire swamp down her throat, had a smoke, and then pasted her larynx together with peanut butter. Awful.

Though I have once or twice had issues with lower-English phone reps -- immigrants in the US or outsourced call center, same deal either way -- where it took a few tries to be able to describe a problem that was not simple or straightforward. Idiom, analogy, and metaphor really help in that kind of situation and it takes two people on the same linguistic page for that to work, heh.

But none of that stopped me from being really surprised when I had to call JetBlue about something last summer and in their hold recording was a reminder that I was speaking to an office in Salt Lake City. On the one hand, it was kind of nice to know it and on the other hand it bothered me that people like my racist jackass uncle who always has loud complaints about why brown people in foreign lands are useless (*sigh*) get to win that one.

@mrdeeno: There are assholes in *every* country, yo. And I think most of people's complaints about foreign call-centers boil down to some or all of the following:

- the reps can be difficult to understand
- the reps often don't have a good understanding of the company, the customers, or the culture in which the job they're doing is supposed to take place (I don't assume that *I'd* be good at repping for Chinese customers either)
- the companies doing the outsourcing were idiots about blatantly firing U.S. workers and celebrating how great it was to be able to hire people at cheaper than U.S. minimum wage to do the same work overseas, which *ought* to anger people, since the idea is that companies with mostly U.S. customer bases are supposed to abide by U.S. labor laws

...Yes, there are racists and whatnot in the U.S. (and China, and Japan, and India...) -- but I don't think that's what this is really about. There are legitimate reasons why this type of outsourcing is bad.

Racism! Racism! Racism!

@mrdeeno: First of all, as Murph1908 pointed out, on top of being a racist you are a hypocrite for decrying racism.

Secondly, this is not a question of race so much as a pragmatic issue of communication. When your sole responsibility is communicating in english towards the quick resolution of a problem, it really does matter if english is in fact your first language.

I had a fun call center experience with Sprint earlier this year:

1. I had been overcharged for a phone (it was a really obvious overcharge resulting from from exchanging a phone that was DOA).
2. The call center employee (who had an accent that suggested Indian descent) figured out my problem, but screwed up the math and credited my account $60, when it needed a $150 credit. She realized the mistake and transferred me to a different call center where the call was handled by someone with an apparently American accent.
3. American accent call center employee then credited my account $150. I pointed out that this was an overcredit, since I had already been credited $60, but the lady didn't seem to mind.
4. I effectively got a free month of service from their screw-up, despite the fact that I was honest and encouraged them to fix it.

@snickers: might we stop with the gross generalizations?

I hope more companies follow suit. I dread calling Charter Cable. Too many times, I've had to end the call, and call back simply because the accent was so heavy that I coudn't understand what the rep was saying.

And it's not only the accent that can get in the way of communication. One Indian rep couldn't grasp the concept of a locked junction box on the inside of my apartment building and adamantly insisted a technician only needed to climb a telephone pole to connect my service. Maybe it's different in India.

@RandomHookup: You and mrdeeno should get together for a good old fashioned hate-off.

S wht wll ll th ch-wlls wh cn't gt n "Wh Wnts t b Mllnr?" d t mk mny?

@Mary Marsala with Fries: Don't forget that outsourcing airline customer support can be somewhat problematic if the country you outsource to doesn't have a solid grasp of american geography.. Like the time I got stuck overnight in baltimore, and had to explain to the nice lady over the phone why denver would be a poor connection to houston.

I honestly have never had a problem with an overseas call center. I feel that most of the frustration from call centers come from the call center itself not hte accent of the employee

This goes to show that if enough people complain, things WILL change. It reminds me of the policy of Wal-Mart to avoid the word "Christmas" a few years ago. They quickly reversed course on that one.

@Sparerib: @pezstar: I believe this was a "Slumdog Millionare(Oscar winner)" reference, as the main character was a tea maker (wallah(sp?) translates roughly to someone who does a specific task) for a call center, and not a "slur".

@deadandy:

Exactly! The problem is that instead of people with brains and training that can actually diagnose the problem (or you can convince them a hard drive making loud clicks is the problem without following the other two dozen steps of a script), they reduced "diagnosis" to following a set of prescribed steps with a human robot which has no more concept than if it were just another phone tree "Is the large red switch in back in the ON position, press 1 if yes, 2 if no...)". Some people may benefit, but by the time I call in, I've already diagnosed the problem and likely have the bad part ready to ship back. Or I'm trying to do something obscure or unsupported (like when iTunes mislabels all the tracks in an audiobook CD and there is NO way of deleting the whole, only editing individual tracks).

But by the time they train most Indian call centers adequately, they are no longer as competitive.

This is why I always called the 404 number. Its local and I ALWAYS get a person here in Atlanta.

Maybe what would really help is for American companies to stop treating customer service as an especially odious form of overhead and start treating it as an important method for cultivating repeat customers.

As for overseas call centers, based on my own experience I have a low opinion of them. When it comes to technical subjects, like computer tech support, speaking English as a second language really is a hindrance. The typical result is they try to shoehorn your problem into their script, whether it fits or not, and if you get them off their script they're useless.

I'll also echo the comment that the outsourced call centers often don't seem to be in close contact with the mothership. As in, they know nothing about rebates, sales, recalls, etc. issued by the parent company.

The thing that grinds my gears about overseas call centers is the fact that the reps can usually not do anything to actually help you. They can generally answer basic questions and whatnot, but do not have to power to make changes. An credit card company i used to deal with (which I won't name, since this was a while ago, and things may have changed) was real bad. I actually got to the point that when I needed to call, the first thing I would say is "Can I pleased be transfered to a customer service representitive located in the U.S.?" It worked, and I always got what I needed.

The truth is that people have a hard time with accents and, worse yet, dialects. When you call already frustrated about an issue, the last thing you need is to double the frustration with a language barrier.

As an English speaking Canadian from Ontario, I want to speak with someone from Ontario or more west. After that someone from the UK (only because I've been there enough to have experience with the accent/dialects). Next up would be North-Eastern US states. Then North-Western US states. Then southern US states. Then someone who isn't from North America or the UK. Then Eastern Canada. And last, but not least, Mother-Tongue French Quebec.

It's not a hate thing. It's a "I seriously don't understand what the hell you mean by 'Bienvenue, la vie est Belle!' without thinking about it A LOT." and I'm willing to think that people here also don't want to wrap their brains around 'Y'all have a good day now!' as an exit, or 'For that you would need to please be speaking with my supervisor' for anything unless it's what they're used to.

You can train the reps not to make these flubs, but considering how low paid the job is, how stressful it is, and how much pressure there is, you will fail at it.

You could pay lots more and hire people who are fluent at various dialects, of course. But that defeats the purpose.

@SpongeSteveSquareDave_GitEmSteveDave : Yep, I wasn't trying to be mean...I saw Slumdog a week ago. The lead character was an "assistant" in a call center, basically fetching tea for everyone.

@Gann: Exactly. I don't care where you're from, or whether English is your first, second, or nineteenth language.

I would have no problem dealing with a CSR originally from Azerbaijan if his English was fluent, while I would not want to try and deal with a born and bred American who was not fluent in English.

It isn't where you're from, it's whether you can speak the language at a level where we can communicate. It doesn't matter if your accent is Indian or hillbilly -- if it's too pronounced for you to do a job whose most important skill is "speaking fluent English", you're in the wrong job.

@Mary Marsala with Fries: "the reps often don't have a good understanding of the company, the customers, or the culture in which the job they're doing is supposed to take place (I don't assume that *I'd* be good at repping for Chinese customers either)"

My one GOOD foreign call center experience was a result of a cultural misunderstanding. I had to deal with a problem with our mortgage, which is in my husband's name. He has a slightly unusual first name, and we have different last names. I got an Indian call center, and I said I was calling about "Wulfgang Smith's account" (I specifically did NOT say I Wulfgang Smith). Only the account holder is allowed to deal with the account, but sometimes places will bend the rules and let the spouse do it. Anyway, THIS time, the rep had no idea Wulfgang was a man's name, assumed *I* was "Ms. Wulfgang Smith" called me "Wulfgang" and let me manage the account!

Terrible for security, one would think, but saved me two hours of bickering!

The worst call center language barrier I had was with a native English speaker. I was in London and had to call the UK customer service center for American Airlines regarding my flight home. Apparently their call center is in Scotland and, while the British may be able to decypher a heavy Scottish accent, this Californian couldn't. At least Trainspotting had subtitles...

@RandomHookup: I think if your comment had a colorful dance number choreographed to Jai Ho by the Pussycat Dolls, people would have "gotten it".

@SpongeSteveSquareDave_GitEmSteveDave: Holy crap, pull up your pants. You are not a homoerotic Abercrombie ad.

@snickers: What?! Explain this.

What I like least about dealing with foreign call centers is that blatantly lie to you from the very beginning.

Listen dude, I know your name isn't Bobby. You can tell me your real name. Lying to me doesn't get this situation off to a good start.

@SirNotAppearing: There is nothing "erotic" about that.

@dragonfire81: When I worked at a call center in Canada that handled American customers, I only had a few people adamantly refuse to speak to a Canadian and demand to be transferred to an American center.

This intrigues me. How did the callers know they were reaching a call center based out of Canada?

@mrdeeno:
Perhaps she assumed that because you were (presumably) dressed nicely and holding the door, you worked there. I can't tell you the last time a stranger held the door for me vs. having it slam in my face.

The worst part about dealing with foreign call centers isn't the accents, it's that they have absolutely no power to help you in any way and try to make up for it by being sickeningly polite. You may as well shout into the wind.