mrbiggsndatx

mrbiggsndatx

spunky_redhead15

Yeah, and I'm the Dahli Lamha from 2 blocks over. Where did you say you were from ? Is that in the US ? How about you give me your address and phone number and I'll call you back later at 2:00 PM."

Oh is this a bad time for you, someone can call you at a more convenient time. All I need is B's Social Security Number.

And all I need is to hang up, Boris. [click]

redhand32

It seems as thought the people running the show here, can not take a cue from Dell and Apple, two companies who found out the hard way a customer's perception on outsourcing.

It's a total train wreck, this company is being run into the ground intentionally.

nitemareglitch

one day after spending a considerable amount of time on the phone with a customer, we decided the problem was not on our end, and that she needed to speak with the company who handles her internet service (not at&t in this case to be clear)

to be polite, i called the company for her, explained my situation (i am calling on behalf of ... and this is the problem ... this is what we did ... here is what you need to do), well of course the guy who answered was in india, and he was totally blowing me off and not listening and was very flat and monotone, honestly i don't think he even piked up on my whole description of the problem, even though i explained it slowly and clearly (i am unfortunately used to this)

if i remember correctly, it was a dns server issue plain and simple, and all he could do was keep asking for the customers login/password information (totally off-topic as i had explained he could get that info from her in a moment)

now i understand, he likely keyed in on something i said at the start of the call, and then tuned me out for 5min, it was bad... like to the point of me yelling at him to stop asking me the same stupid question (the customer was simply not comfortable explaining technical things such as dns server settings ... can you blame her?)

i felt bad, but was totally frustrated, and finally transferred her, with absolutely no confidence she was going to be helped properly, but that there was securely nothing more i could do to make this individual understand

create

dragonfire81

I pay my bill by they automatically debiting my card for the amount. Well apparently last month, they decided to debit it late, and change me a late fee.

The late fee was only $0.48 - I was thinking about not calling at all, but I had the day off and nothing better to do.

So I called them up - - - thinking it would be easy to get them to see that if they decide to debit my card late, I really should not be charged the late fee.

Well they did finally remove the charges...... after almost 50 minutes on the phone.

coan_net

As a CSR, I agree. The scripts are shitty, our mock-wiki of solutions is hard to follow and sometimes missing steps. I understand you're frustrated, and that you hate to hear this script, but unless I want to auto-fail, I am required to say it. This includes things such as displaying empathy ("Yes ma'am, I'm very sorry for the inconvenience, and I'll be more than glad to help you with that today,") rebranding the call, and asking probing questions that are often useless.

However, we do have a lot of barely-english speaking calls, both from customers and outsourced technicians. I'm reasonably sure that there's an option for other languages in the IVR- I know there's at least one for Spanish, as we have specific Spanish-speaking agents. If you speak another language, know how to ask for a rep that speaks that language- all attempts will be made to find one for you. It is impossible for me to troubleshoot you if you can't comprehend basic English sentence structure.

As for monitors go, in my center each agent is supposed to recieve at least 3 monitors a week. I don't know what gets sent to corporate, but we are graded based on these, then our supervisors discuss what we need to improve on.

komies

How AT&T's ROCC (regional operations control center) is run:

There's an Indian outsourcing company that has a response center in 2 or 3 locations in India, that takes the majority of the problem calls, BUT!....
-- there's an INSOURCED mostly-Indian shift of people who work at AT&T HQ taking some calls and alarm reports, and also works with the Indian outsource group to actually page in people for conference calls and handle problems. They also have a few leftover AT&T employees from the days when it was staffed fully by employees, there to train and be available as a last-resort for a big issue. The Indian company also hires a handful of Americans in, to liase with their remote staff on problems, as well. I've never seen any place run quite so strangely.

cortana

I once had a really intractable DSL problem & spent 40 minutes on the phone with the Indians. Finally it was escalated to Tier 2 [in St. Louis, I think] & they had the solution in a couple of minutes. It was a routing error caused by a person at AT&T that caused thousands of DSL lines to go down in Chicago. It took them a few hours to correct it. The Indians knew nothing of this.

Last year, Kraft Foods outsourced most of its tech support to India. It's been a tragedy of errors since then. Some senior vp, a clown named Lee Coulter keeps sending out bullshit emails saying they're working on it & trying to improve the Indians English language skills. HaHaHa!
About 30% of the calls still go to US based support & when people get them, instead of India, they tell them not to hang up until we're sure that it's fixed, they don't want to have to call back & get India that time.
The Indians just don't understand the language or Kraft's internal policies & fuck up everything!
And the company keeps going down the crapper & the morale is atrocious as everyone knows Kraft won't exist in five years!

Greasy Thumb Guzik

(You see this so often in budgets and in measurement metrics, where the department-by-department is closely monitored but the overall numbers are never engaged with in a way that looks at how the departments INTERACT. They say "We want to spend less on X" and ask all departments to spend less on X, which they might well do by passing their X off to another department or stealing their X from them, and since X isn't looked at cross-department, or how departments interact isn't considered, the solution is worse than the problem. Like when I was at law school, the school was like "We want to spend less on faculty printing costs" and limited faculty ability to print ... so faculty started snagging paper from the student computer labs, and the budget people were puzzled as to why student printing costs were skyrocketing. Stupid stupid stupid.)

Eyebrows McGee

wesa

dantsea

One example: When I was tasked as a team lead in the middle of a new backend deployment, I had Jenell Quick, then the US operations manager (who was later given a choice between being fired or resigning, for other reasons not too distantly related to this), bring me into the office and start screaming -- literally, yes -- that I had overstepped my bounds and was never to directly ask our development staff for status updates. Never mind the fact that my team of ten people were sitting around with nothing to do for a week, updating their MySpace profiles and gossiping on LiveJournal on the client's dime.

In November, HyperQuality managed to convince the last of its clients insisting on a US-based process to move that work to India and laid off all but a handful of people, who are being kept on for the sake of client relations (more than likely because combined they're cheaper than the one VP who did all this work, but quit abruptly).

Now that the US team is gone, I wonder who they're going to blame their lack of profitability on this time?

dantsea

wesa

Partly this is caused by too many people having their finger in the documentation pie. I worked for a company where each city they served was run like its own independent little fief.

So there was documentation that came from the corporate office. And then each separate area came up with their own documentation that often duplicated and/or contradicted the national stuff.

And then all of this was mixed into a gigantic clusterf**k of a database, poorly labeled by city, and not maintained.

Then, some areas ran with their own internal websites, which I suppose was great for them, but completely left any outsourced or corporate escalations folks out of the loop.

The other side of this problem is that new stuff (billing plans, features, products, procedures) come out all the time. But lots of reps learn one way of doing things and never, ever want to change. They will accept no new information at all. This also leads to different answers all the time.

Corydon

Ogres have layers, and layers, and layers.

Zagrophyte

This is all after that company fired all their US based lower tech support in favor of india based tech support at 1/3 the cost (at least). I was actually trying to get one of the lower tech support positions there and work my way up like my friend did. But i didn't get the position and a month later they fired everyone and shipped it all to india. His job was OK because he works in a higher tier of support. But he tells me how he gets calls all the time escalated to him and his office due to india tech support actually breaking their products while trying to fix them.

socalrob

Rest assured, if it's regarding your landline or wireless service, you'll recieve the same horrific service as always with an American accent.

outofoffice

My experiences were quite a bit different - but then again, the calls were completely different.

Since we were with an outsourcing company, the clients of course were much more worried about call times, idle times, sales attempts, and the basic formalities than they were about customer service. So yeah, it was crummy.

I'll agree 100% that doing QA work is pretty much crap. :)

dwarf74

so you're saying they cant hear shit either?

oakie

If At&t were wanting to solve their problems, it sounds like the best way to do it is close the call centers with the highest QA rating. Sound like when I used to work there...sheesh...

Crymson_77

rainmkr

#9... What is everyone's surprise? Call centers are no place for the creative. Creativity and problem-solving go hand in hand. Problem-solving is anathema to the purpose of a call center. The real purpose of a call center is to 1) pretend to offer a service that makes the company appear competitive 2) make the potential customer feel more comfortable about buying technology that is new and scary 3) avoid legal liability issues 4) help them gauge what features make future products popular.

#4... This is how their training software is written (my brother used to help write it for Accenture and blistered my eardrums regularly complaining about the stupid guidelines he was required to follow). Blame the people who are in charge of making up what needs to go in the training materials.

speedwell

Of course, my parents use the reverse technique for telemarketing sales calls. "I no understand English" and hang up.

azntg

friendlynerd

#3 just made my eyes cross and I won't comment on it until I can take an aspirin and draw myself a map.

#4 makes it seem like I'd rather just spend my time with an automated system. Wouldn't that save the company more money to just set up an Eliza program and skip outsourcing altogether?

And #9 intrigues me greatly. Who are these people? They should be reunited under some intelligent company. A customer-service all-star type of team.

Jim

floyderdc

B

halloweenjack

SmellyGatto