To be fair, that doesn't seem to be the opinion of the general populace, or at least any I had encountered during work. Most Americans with whom I spoke had known at least one other person whose job was sent out to another country. Even here in Canada I saw the writing on the wall when part of my tech support group was taking place in India. I got out of there and about a year later the dept as a whole was moved to India. No one was laid off, they were just moved to a new tech branch, but still.
Yeh, they actually know how to work. Not their fault some people can't hear around a different accent. Only time I have trouble with people who have a different accent is not because of the accent, it's because their culture has taught them to speak quietly and I can't hear them above the hum of the computer or noise coming in the window.
Yeh, the English training people get overseas is phenominal. Often those who speak English as a second language are much better at it than those for whom English is a mother tongue.
It's not usually the accent, for me, and if they're too quiet, you just need to up the volume on your phone.
My usual problem with Indian tech support is twofold: 1) Outsourcing means the techs are far away from the problem and, most often, have never directly used the product or service they are supporting. Worse, they generally have no authority to even report problems until they've run through a script. You'll notice, for this, I said "outsourcing", not just "outsourcing to India" - you get this problem outsourcing to Canada or Scotland or to elsewhere in your home country, too.
2) Whoever wrote the book that all the Indian centres use on how to relate to the customer? Should be killed. All the QA agents that make the phone guys follow it? Also killed. Saying "Do you mind if I call you John?" - that's fine. But they all, and I mean *all*, then use my name to start AND end EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE.
And that drives me completely fucking nuts. And if I say "yes, I mind", it's then "sir do you see any lights on the device sir?" instead.
It's not usually the accent, for me, and if they're too quiet, you just need to up the volume on your phone.
That doesn't help in person. ;) Also, I often DID have my phone at maximum volume and I STILL can't hear them. I hate asking someone to speak louder, but I don't get much of an option.
Yeah, call centres always want you to use a customers name at least three times during a call. I hardly ever did and QA never noticed anyway. Mind you, using a name twice MIGHT just be something from their own language. I could never understand in Rurouni Kenshin why the protagonist always repeated part of his sentence at the end, until I started learning Japanese. What he said would be just a literal translation to English, but in English it sounds redundant. For example, "I'm very glad for this, that I am." or "You're making me angry, that you are." They're not actual sentences from the show, just the type of redundancy you'd find.
When I did tech support for HP, we were required to take apart the printers and put them back together again. We did the same that authorised HP repair people can do, basically. We didn't have a script aside from the line with which we answered the call and the line with which we ended the call.
When I worked for an American cell phone company, on the other hand.. I've never used their service or touched the phones they sell. Mostly b/c I'm in Canada where their service doesn't reach (obviously).
I DO hate the techs who are OBVIOUSLY following a computer screen type of troubleshooting like that which Windows has for itself. Or when you call your Internet ISP and have to go through 30 minutes of the same thing every single time before they try something new.
At least our management hasn't gotten around to making those sorts of rules yet. They're happy if you can just manage to solve the customer's problem (unlike many of my first-line colleagues..). We do have a call-start line, but nobody cares if you use even that much, especially as long as you're polite & competent[1].
Given the level of knowledge that some of our people have, yes, I do have to recheck some things briefly even if this is the 5th time you called, like did you find the demarc, did you test there, what does it look like, no that usually isn't an actual official demarc, did you check the meter cupboard yet, and how about the hallway, or the crawlspace, and you have reset the modem, right?
It won't take more than 1-2 minutes if the answer is what it should be, either way.
[1] One former colleague was well-known for answering with ", met " ('met being dutch short for "[you're speaking] with"). And that's not the reason he's former.
It depends; I have had some EXCELLENT technical support from Dell's (clearly Indian outsourced) customer support service.
My problem is not the outsourcing of tech support, but if you're going to be customer-facing, know the language and know it well. There's nothing more annoying than having to repeat yourself, and ask for the person you're talking to to repeat themself, over and over and over when you're already frustrated enough to have called Customer Support in the first place.
Where I work, the problem is that quite a few of the customers don't speak the language all that well. And I don't mean accents, I mean fuill-blown first-generation-immigrant-with-200-word-vocabulary, that often doesn't include words necessary for a decent troubleshoot, or explaining that they've got a worm on their pc and therefore we've cut off their internet. Yes, that PC will work just fine on another person's internet, but it still needs to be reformatted.
I'm sure most in Michigan and Pennsylvania wouldn't share that opinion, but I've encountered the sentiment a lot in laypeople both in person and on the intarbutts. I have no problem with the while global economy thing, but the hypocrisy of the "My Canadian-Built Ford is as American as apple pie!" people screaming "beaners are stealing our jobs!" pisses me off, especially when it's done as a part of public policy.
I'm reminded of the joke Bryan Adams tells about getting stopped at Montreal customs because they weren't sure he was really a Canadian.
"Look, I'm on my way home from Germany, where I used Japanese instruments to record a song written by a Brit for an American movie filmed in Scotland. What could be more Canadian than that?"
I got a hard time going to Vancouver once, when the Canadian-side guard wasn't sure why I needed an 18th century theater sword with a fake flintlock pistol built into the pommel sitting in the back seat... on September 19th.
Then another time on the way back towards Seattle I was held for five hours, because apparently a US veteran with the name of Hatfield is pretty high up on their watch lists, I guess from being related to 150-year-old moonshine running mass murderers.
Interestingly, the last time I took a sword through Canadian customs they carefully put it aside (as in, made of glass careful, not scary-object careful) and got very excited about the books that were under it.
Because, yknow, they could be kiddy porn. Or nazi literature. Or something.
For public policiy, it's just because they don't want to piss off one of their major trading partners: us. I'm confident that the sentiments regarding outsourcing vary across the country. There were many who weren't happy that their US companies were having their call centres in Canada, but almost everyone said they'd rather it be Canada than India because "at least in Canada you speak English." -_- That still makes me wince.
But still, you're right.. it doesn't make sense to claim that something made in Canada is American whilst the same product made in a different nation is not. In both cases, Americans lost jobs which were gained somewhere else.
I oversee a lot of customer service related work that passes my desk, some of it outsourced, some of it not. I see stupid errors on both sides of the ocean but i definitely see many more error from the Indian sites. Language is a two way thing. It's not just the Americans who have a problem understanding.
Sadly, there's a lot of border agents out there protecting America from their own phantom fears rather than actual risks... I remember one rough border crossing on the way to a convention with one of our group getting the gears by one agent while a second agent behind the first was quietly shaking his head in dismay and empathy.
-- Steve hates it when that happens, but sadly there's more border than oversight.
What gets under my skin is that this guy is now on The List even though the rent-a-cop was wrong for putting him there.
"[Border officers] are not immune to the news every day that comes out that thousands if not millions of Americans are losing their jobs — so that if they become sensitized to that issue, it would be, of course, understandable, and that's probably what happened in this case."
That's just bullshit. If the regulations and training are so lax that an individual customs official can choose to adapt to the day's news conservative talk radio show and international business is dependent on which official you talk to? That's no way to run a superpower.
... what surprises me more than this redneck denying a Canadian entry is that there apparently ARE laws against a Canadian salesman crossing the border to sell US prodects to US citizens? WTF?
Working in the USA without a work visa is illegal. There's no difference, really, between him going down once a year to sell at a convention and some guy in Windsor crossing the border once a day to work retail. They're both illegal without a permit.
However, permits are expensive, a hassle, and what he is doing is manifestly *not* illegal.
He wasn't going to sell, as far as I could see. He was going to set up to _buy_.
Regardless, that border agent(of intolerance) needs to be quietly retired to a nice island in the center of the country where he won't have to worry anymore.
I know. What I'm saying is, there *are* things it's illegal to cross the border and do, and customs has the job of stopping you from crossing the border to do those things.
He wasn't doing any of those things, but they do exist.
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Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-19 03:42 pm (UTC)Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-19 04:18 pm (UTC)Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-19 04:35 pm (UTC)Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-19 04:52 pm (UTC)Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-19 04:56 pm (UTC)Actually, they're probably having more trouble, because damn near all the Indian techs I've dealt with recently had very clear, distinct voices.
Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-19 05:24 pm (UTC)Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-19 04:59 pm (UTC)My usual problem with Indian tech support is twofold:
1) Outsourcing means the techs are far away from the problem and, most often, have never directly used the product or service they are supporting. Worse, they generally have no authority to even report problems until they've run through a script. You'll notice, for this, I said "outsourcing", not just "outsourcing to India" - you get this problem outsourcing to Canada or Scotland or to elsewhere in your home country, too.
2) Whoever wrote the book that all the Indian centres use on how to relate to the customer? Should be killed. All the QA agents that make the phone guys follow it? Also killed. Saying "Do you mind if I call you John?" - that's fine. But they all, and I mean *all*, then use my name to start AND end EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE.
And that drives me completely fucking nuts. And if I say "yes, I mind", it's then "sir do you see any lights on the device sir?" instead.
Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-19 05:35 pm (UTC)need to up the volume on your phone.
That doesn't help in person. ;) Also, I often DID have my phone at maximum volume and I STILL can't hear them. I hate asking someone to speak louder, but I don't get much of an option.
Yeah, call centres always want you to use a customers name at least three times during a call. I hardly ever did and QA never noticed anyway. Mind you, using a name twice MIGHT just be something from their own language. I could never understand in Rurouni Kenshin why the protagonist always repeated part of his sentence at the end, until I started learning Japanese. What he said would be just a literal translation to English, but in English it sounds redundant. For example, "I'm very glad for this, that I am." or "You're making me angry, that you are." They're not actual sentences from the show, just the type of redundancy you'd find.
When I did tech support for HP, we were required to take apart the printers and put them back together again. We did the same that authorised HP repair people can do, basically. We didn't have a script aside from the line with which we answered the call and the line with which we ended the call.
When I worked for an American cell phone company, on the other hand.. I've never used their service or touched the phones they sell. Mostly b/c I'm in Canada where their service doesn't reach (obviously).
I DO hate the techs who are OBVIOUSLY following a computer screen type of troubleshooting like that which Windows has for itself. Or when you call your Internet ISP and have to go through 30 minutes of the same thing every single time before they try something new.
Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-21 10:05 pm (UTC)Given the level of knowledge that some of our people have, yes, I do have to recheck some things briefly even if this is the 5th time you called, like did you find the demarc, did you test there, what does it look like, no that usually isn't an actual official demarc, did you check the meter cupboard yet, and how about the hallway, or the crawlspace, and you have reset the modem, right?
It won't take more than 1-2 minutes if the answer is what it should be, either way.
[1] One former colleague was well-known for answering with ", met " ('met being dutch short for "[you're speaking] with"). And that's not the reason he's former.
Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-19 06:16 pm (UTC)My problem is not the outsourcing of tech support, but if you're going to be customer-facing, know the language and know it well. There's nothing more annoying than having to repeat yourself, and ask for the person you're talking to to repeat themself, over and over and over when you're already frustrated enough to have called Customer Support in the first place.
Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-21 10:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 05:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 05:13 pm (UTC)"Look, I'm on my way home from Germany, where I used Japanese instruments to record a song written by a Brit for an American movie filmed in Scotland. What could be more Canadian than that?"
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 05:32 pm (UTC)Then another time on the way back towards Seattle I was held for five hours, because apparently a US veteran with the name of Hatfield is pretty high up on their watch lists, I guess from being related to 150-year-old moonshine running mass murderers.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 10:42 pm (UTC)Because, yknow, they could be kiddy porn. Or nazi literature. Or something.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 06:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 05:38 pm (UTC)But still, you're right.. it doesn't make sense to claim that something made in Canada is American whilst the same product made in a different nation is not. In both cases, Americans lost jobs which were gained somewhere else.
Re: Too big to fail.
Date: 2009-03-20 03:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 03:56 pm (UTC)Jeeze, the stupid, it burns.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 04:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 08:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 04:20 pm (UTC)-- Steve hates it when that happens, but sadly there's more border than oversight.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 04:52 pm (UTC)"[Border officers] are not immune to the news every day that comes out that thousands if not millions of Americans are losing their jobs — so that if they become sensitized to that issue, it would be, of course, understandable, and that's probably what happened in this case."
That's just bullshit. If the regulations and training are so lax that an individual customs official can choose to adapt to the day's
newsconservative talk radio show and international business is dependent on which official you talk to? That's no way to run a superpower.(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 04:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 04:38 pm (UTC)However, permits are expensive, a hassle, and what he is doing is manifestly *not* illegal.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 04:42 pm (UTC)Regardless, that border agent(of intolerance) needs to be quietly retired to a nice island in the center of the country where he won't have to worry anymore.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 04:51 pm (UTC)He wasn't doing any of those things, but they do exist.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 05:39 pm (UTC)Yeah, last time I crossed back into the US, the Customs guy asked me if I had any fruits or vegetables.
Going into Canada, I got asked if I had any guns, knives, or explosives.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 04:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-19 06:12 pm (UTC)