Beware: Your Customers Oppose Outsourcing

I have had many positive experiences with services centers who outsourced customer serivce. It took only one call to the same service center and a person who was unable to help me either d/t a change in the companys policy or maybe I was not able to understand the rationale verbalized to me d/t accent. But the tendancy was for me to blame the person with the accent for my woes vs puting the blame where it should be. I was asking for the customer service person to help in an area he had no power over. Since I had a history of past poor performance with the product I had purchased necessitating the use of what I thought was frequent customer service help; I have finally realized it is the product I am unhappy with not the outsourced help I received.

My experiences with anything via the telephone and a heavy accent on the other end has always ended with me in trying first and then when I cannot understand what is being said, request a supervisor til I get one who can speak well or atleast can understand me. I expect it anymore with
business the way it is today. I can't say I like it but I know it happens regardless of my perspectives. I do not hesitate to bring up the issue if I have to make more than one call to resolve the same issue over and over...in those cases, something should be done to not have that happening to customers.

As a former computer repair person I have used call centers for software, computer and other computer related problems many, many times in the past. I have to say that I would much rather speak to someone who was raised in the U.S. and speaks American English. It is very slow, thus frustrating when speaking to Help Desk Techs in countries such as India. Although they do speak English it is very poor and they do not pick up on things like somone who has lived in the U.S. all of there life would. You often have to break things down for them, so that they can understand. I would much rather speak to an American when trying to get help over the phone, regardless of why I am calling. It has been my experience that an American can fix my problem faster because they know what I am telling them and they know where or who can help me if they do not know themselves. Every time I get an overseas call center I get transfered much more or they have to reasearch my problem and call me back. I do have to say they always come up with an answer to my problem or at the very least another solution, it just takes much longer and it is more aggravating because of the language differences. Having said all of this, you have to give credit to those who work in oversea call centers, I have found most of them in my previous line of work to have a Master's Degree and speak at least 2 languages, yet they make half the money as an American doing the same work with only a high school degree and who only speaks 1 language. I have also found they tend to work longer hours than Americans and come up with more things for the company they work for to sell, for example they help make a lot of the new computer software being sold today and because of the pay differences it costs a lot less to develop then it would here in the U.S.