CSRs need to be able to communicate properly
During the last few years, many enterprises have moved their call centers to regions of the world where the labor cost is much lower. This has reduced the cost of providing customer service to callers. Unfortunately, the customer service representatives (CSRs) do not speak English very well. In fact, they often have such severe accents that they are virtually impossible to understand. They, in turn, have difficulty understanding what the caller is saying. This situation makes communication difficult and often impossible.
One of the gethuman standards states: All operators/representatives of the organization should be able to communicate clearly with the caller (i.e. accents should not hinder communication; representatives should have excellent diction and enunciation.)
From the number of complaints that we receive each month on this topic, it is clear that very few of the overseas-based call centers are meeting this requirement.
What should be done about this? We would be interested in hearing some ideas on dealing with this. One approach would be to identify the enterprises that are using off-shore call centers where their CSRs do not communicate well. We've added an item to the gethuman customer rating form that would let us obtain this information. With this data, we would then be able to identify the enterprises that are using CSRs that are difficult to understand, and let them know that they have a problem that they need to fix.
I recently had problems with my Dell computer. When I contacted dell support there was a five minute wait till the next available person. When someone came on line i had difficulty understanding and he did not really understand my problem. The results of his help was a partially destroyed hard drive. The next call was answered by a different person with the same results.
After three more techs my hard drive was blank, and had to be replaced.
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This is a great horror story, Roger. You should vote on Dell and leave the story. Just click on the companies name in the gethuman database and leave your story. We are going to be giving prizes for the best call center stories (either awful or great experiences). In addition to story possibly winning a prize, we will be feeding the stories back to folks like Dell.
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Additional: To add insult to injury, the new hard drive Dell installed appears to have internal problems. I have used e-mail help and so far I have been contacted by three different techs with no fix. Each one asks for information on my problem. There is no followup by only one tech. Each response is by a different tech with the same questions.
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I have found when this happens I tell whoever I am talking to I want my call put back to the United States They will reroute your call upon request.
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I wish I had known this. I have had problems with both peoplepc and amazon because the person at the other end did not understand English well enough to understand my problem. I finally gave up on amazon. With peoplepc, I finally managed to bug them enough by email that someone called me.
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Joyce,
Great tip! I plan to add it to our Tips page.
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Dell Tech Support employees are *very* difficult to understand, most speaking with a heavy Indian accent. Makes "tech talk" extremely difficult. Besides that, they seem to be reading from "scripts."
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Did you tell us about this by evaluating Dell? Just click on the companies name and you will get a brief form to fill out. Takes about 5 seconds. We will use your information to get Dell to change.
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The script reading is really ANNOYING! They are usually quite unhelpful and very VERY hard to understand. I usually hang up and call back till I get someone who can speak English. I had one Indian guy, for HSBC, tell me he couldn't remove some late fees, which were the fault of the credit card company. I ended up calling someone else, an American, and he had no problem fixing the problem. That's just one of many CSR problems I've had with oversea CSRs.
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Did you tell us about this by evaluating HSBC? Just click on the companies name and you will get a brief form to fill out. Takes about 5 seconds. We will use your information to get HSBC to change.
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I am glad this website exits! I have been very leary of conducting business with a non-native speaker of English. There is just too high of a chance for miscommunication and misunderstanding on their part. I have actually had representatives tell me that I misunderstood... I think not! Perhaps some governing body (FCC ?) should regulate this area. thank you for the forum to share.
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If you want to get the FCC (or FTC) to regulate this area, your should write to your congressman. To be effective you would need to organize a letter writing campaign and get millions of consumers to write to their congressman. If you are serious about this, why don't you compose a letter and I would be willing to assist you with this. Also - if you rate each of the companies that you call on the gethuman web site, we will use the information that you provide to get them to change. Just click on the companies name and give us your evaluation. Takes less than 5 minutes.
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I have called the Hewlett-Packard line a couple of times regarding a printer that we ordered that did not work. Although the techs used American sounding names, I could tell they were in India or Pakistan. They botched the name of our office manager so badly that we did not even recognize it when the new printer arrived. Plus, they said they would send a mail label to ship the old one back within 15 days so we were not charged. Well, that didn't happen. So, I give HP call center one star out of 5. I can't control where my agency buys its computers from, but I will not be buying any more HP stuff for my home. Maybe next time I will talk to the HP techs with my best Apu accent and say my name is Bubba!
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