Rude Callers Are Stressin’ Out Indian Call Center Staff

1. Dale
   January 9th, 2008 at 7:29 am

   I don’t think there’s need for the abuse people give down the phone; but it’s extremely frustrating to be put through to a call centre that deals with important personal details that don’t understand half of what you’re saying and vice versa.

2. Algonkin
   January 9th, 2008 at 7:55 am

   Every time I call Hewlett Packard for technical support, I get routed to India…and yes, it is VERY frustrating. Reason? Their accent. You can’t understand what they say let alone getting connected to phone system whose volume is turned down way low.

   I blame these huge enterprises such as the above mentioned, who profit from cheap labour! That’s where the problem is.

   Bu truthfully, there is no need to call them f****** cows. They are simply doing their jobs.

3. Acedia
   January 9th, 2008 at 8:30 am

   It’s never ok to insult people but at some point companies are going to have to start realizing that they’re alienating their customers by shunting off their problems on people a half a world away. There’s no way people aren’t going to get mad about it and since there’s no one else to talk to the Indian call center people are going to bear the brunt of the anger.

   I’ve had two nightmare experiences with Indian call centers - one when United Airlines lost (sorry, “delayed”) my bag and one, most recently, when Amazon lost (”delayed”) my order (apparently the US post office is using mule trains these days — it showed up on December 27 — I’d ordered it on December 5.)

   And though the call people were as helpful as was possible — and I didn’t yell at anyone — yes, I was annoyed and inconvenienced and doubly aggravated because these two companies clearly felt that the best way to deal with a mistake was to pawn it off on people who were employed solely on the basis that they were cheap and didn’t cost the company much.

4. Onyxium
   January 9th, 2008 at 9:01 am

   Those idiots deserve the abuse they get! Always calling about mortgages, credit cards, and “free” cell phones! Anytime I hear that retarded accent come up on the other side of the phone, I just grab myself an air-horn and let them have it! If they really wanted to provide great customer service, they’d get someone in there that actually can provide service without looking at a chart to see what they have to say next!

5. just a guy
   January 9th, 2008 at 9:47 am

   Acttually, people can get quite nasty over the phone even when calling an American call center. Before the call center I used to work at was outsorced (a few years ago), any number of people I worked with had a ton of storys of horribly mean callers (and it was inbound-only cutomer service, no sales!)

   So, in all honesty, these guys are really just experiencing what we used to. Race aside, the ‘mean caller’ would find anything to single out and insult you about, and racism wasn’t forbidden (for example, if the caller sounded like a certain ethnicity, or even if the customer preferred a different gender rep..) Of course, they probably have a higher frequency of ‘mean callers’ because of the language issue.

6. ::mwah::
   January 9th, 2008 at 10:07 am

   15 yrs ago a friend of mine worked the FedX call center and she said that they supplied counseling to their employees so they could cope with their jobs.

7. knfr
   January 9th, 2008 at 11:12 am

   I worked in a customer service call center in Texas that was normally a very happy place. The problems were easily fixed and our customer base for the service we provided was generally pleasant. But every once in a while we got treated like dirt for no reason. I felt REALLY bad for the couple of girls in our department that were from the Middle East because they were American citizens and got the worst of it. They were the sweetest gals you would ever want to meet. Do not automatically assume you are not calling America.

   Two of my favorite anecdotes from supervisors:

   To a native Texan:
   “Your twang makes you sound stupid. Give me someone smart.”
   *release*

   To a Mexican-American supervisor:
   “I don’t want to talk to you, give me a native speaker!”
   “I’m sorry, Pocahontas is at lunch.”
   *release*

   Call center people are always willing to do anything to help you if you are really sweet to them. If you act like a jackhole, they’re just going to want you off their line and will do little to care about your needs.

8. Diane
   January 9th, 2008 at 11:12 am

   I use to work for TDS Metrocom. There customer care is still in the main office so they were acrost the hall from me. Those poor people… we are in WISCONSIN!! you can understand us but people are @$$holes anyway… the paramedics turned up more than a few times in the year and a half I was there because people would have heart attacks, panic attacks, and other crazy medical problems.

9. nefx
   January 9th, 2008 at 11:32 am

   Most companies now arent only outsourcing for cheaper labor. Most of the outsourced employees are either friendlier or less likely to return the customers agression when they receive it. I’ve worked at a call center where a significant portion (about 90%) of the employees worked in a call centere in Banglore as well as manila. I dealt with them everyday and they were subject to some of the worst callers yet they refrained from raising their voice or even sounding aggravated on the phone. Its really hard to get that with an american rep that will pretty much yell right back and at times, drop the call.

10. Fazia
    January 9th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    I’m really happy that India is getting all this work from the rest of the world. Good luck to your economy. But seriously, I get pissed when I call a company’s help desk or customer support and get routed to India. It’s bad enough that the product isn’t even being made here, but now even the customer service? Where are all the Canadians and Americans going to go for work? Move to India? When a company actually supports it’s own economy and hire ppl where they are located, they get my vote.

11. Jennifer
    January 9th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    @ Onyxium

    Um, I doubt the Indians working at the incoming call centers (i.e. Hewlett Packard’s help center) are the same ones pestering you with credit card offers and mortgages. These “idiots” are not the people responsible for the companies sending work to their country because of their cheaper wages and relaxed working standards. It’s the investors in these companies (mostly Americans) who have stamped, whined and moaned that need higher profits and be damned if meant sending work to third-world countries.

    As for your complaints about their “retarded” accent …. uh, I think you need to look in the mirror sweetheart and apply that term. These “idiots” are speaking in two languages, and even if there’s a thick accent and the English is struggling a bit, it’s more than what I’m sure you capable of doing.

    If you are American (or even British) do your country a favor, never travel abroad. People like you give America a bad name.

12. Edie
    January 9th, 2008 at 1:49 pm

    Every time I’ve been routed to an outsourced support call center, the help has been very good. Never once had a problem understanding or being understood. My beef is that jobs are being taken away from Americans; I am sure that the folks in foreign call centers are being paid a pittance.

    I’ve worked tech support here in the US, and let me tell you that rudeness is ubiquitous: It’s NOT because of some perceived inferiority of service because of communications between a non-English as first language tech and an English as first language customer; I’ve been called a stupid c*nt because I refused to provide account details to a man who refused to identify properly.

    Customer service comes in many forms. There’s face to face, over the phone, and via email. Face to face is usually the best, but it’s not without frustration and sometimes abusive treatment. Over the phone is worse, because it’s easy to imagine that the person on the other end isn’t real, somehow. Online or by email is the pits; I’ve seen more abusive language from customers via email than both face-to-face and phone combined.

    Think of the “Iron my shirt” bozos who were heckling Hilary; Now compare that to the treatment that Kathy Sierra got.

    Oh, and that guy who called me a stupid c*nt? He spoke with a thick accent.

13. Courageous Grace
    January 9th, 2008 at 3:46 pm

    Heh, I normally don’t get really upset when dealing with telemarketers or outsourced customer service reps (although I have great difficulty in processing English spoken with a thick foreign accent…mostly because I have hearing problems). I do wish customer service wasn’t outsourced so much, though.

    The most recent example of me being rude, though…I don’t even remember what the telemarketer was trying to sell me, but I always politely decline with “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested.” The woman kept pushing and pushing, and (being pregnant and testy already), I responded with “What part of ‘I’m not interested’ do you not understand?”

    She responded with “My, we’re getting a little testy today, aren’t we?” in a really nasty tone and then KEPT trying to sell me whatever it was she was trying to sell. I lost it and screamed “What part of ‘I’m not f***ing interested’ can you not get through your thick skull, you idiot?” then I hung up fuming. I had never done that before and haven’t done it since, and I feel a bit ashamed thinking about it. What I want to know is how they think they are going to get anyone to buy their crap with that attitude?

    I generally try to be as polite as possible to telemarketers when I tell them no and to remove my phone number from their list because I know there’s a real person on the other end of the line just trying to do their job and there’s no reason to be rude.

14. Lekhni
    January 9th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

    I’m Indian and my own experience has been that call center professionals based in the U.S. are actually ruder and less likely to make the extra effort to help you (unless you threaten to close your account, in which case you get instant help).

    With Indian call center professionals, I find that given the amount of people who hurl abuse at them everyday, they are almost grateful, poor guys, when you are polite, and go all out to help you.

    Even in the midst of my frustration (with whetever issue I am calling about), I feel sad about their plight.

15. Skipweasel
    January 9th, 2008 at 5:00 pm

    Well, it seems the general opinion is that caller frustration is (however unforgiveably) at the root of this.

    I suspect it’s because no matter where the call-centre is they’re not able to answer your question. This is generally because by the time you’ve got so desperate that you’re willing to give up and call for help you’ve alread exhausted all the obvious tricks - and guess what they take you through - obvious tricks.

    As for receiving cold calls - we in the UK have one up on your side of the Atlantic - we don’t have to put up with them. A quick visit to TPSonline and within a few days the calls dry up to next to nothing. We get less than two a year now!
    Same with junk mail - MPSonline squashes it.

16. ChrisM70
    January 9th, 2008 at 6:24 pm

    It’s this simple:

    People are tired of crappy service from faceless corporations.

    That’s it. Whether the guy answering the phone is in India or Indiana. Many giant corporations create products that have built-in obsolescence or are poorly made to boost profits and keep stock holders happy and don’t really care about customers or employees.

    Americans hate this - and then when they call a help line, they end up talking to someone that usually has no idea how to help them because the company is too cheap to fix the issue or they give you the run around hoping you will give up (the credit card industry does this). It just makes people even more angry when that call worker is foreign and has been specifically hired to reduce costs and put more Americans out of work.

    Add to this the fact that these upper management people who make the terrible decisions and green-light sub-par products are insulated so they never have to listen to complaints - they make people in foreign call centers do it for pennies.

17. Chris
    January 9th, 2008 at 8:58 pm

    After working in a call center (don’t anymore) I am more polite than usual to any over the phone support personnel. I know in my experience when a costumer was being rude or whathaveyou I would occasionally disconnect or transfer to the wrong department. Keep in mind, Not all call centers are big. Meaning if you call more than once on the same day your experiences might have been shared around the office and coworkers are glad to make life difficult for you aswell

18. Diogenes
    January 9th, 2008 at 9:03 pm

    you can’t pump shit through pipes without it comming up somewhere.
    sorry, that’s a statement, not a comment.

19. MoonCake
    January 9th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

    @Onyxium: yea. totally not the same people. if they are calling YOU, they’re telemarketers. they call you to sell things to you. the customer service people in India are CUSTOMER SERVICE PEOPLE. YOU call THEM.

    @everyone else who complained about outsourcing to india: realize this. the american economy is changing and it will continue to DRASTICALLY change in the next decades to come. the only way you can stop this is by becoming the owner of a company. once you achieve this goal, don’t send your simple jobs to other countries. oh wait- it’s cheaper.. mortgage rates will probably still be falling and you won’t be able to stay in the building your comany is run in. you have two choices: close your business and face bankruptcy, or outsource your customer service for a cheaper price and keep the business. now i’m not saying you necessarily want to do anything about outsourcing, because you understand it’s role within its given societies, and of course it’s not this black and white.

    objectively speaking, i think what message we should get from this is to well, be nicer. how hard must it be for them? some people commented on here that their friends (or even they) worked at a place like this and it was awful. imagine entire populations of young kids going through this every day. how would you feel if you were one of them? and how would you feel towards people who were intolerant of you because you happened to have a terrible job? i’m sure many can relate to this… i’m sure anyone who has worked in the food service has felt this way a couple times. allow me to get off my soap box now… enjoy your days.

20. Gaby
    January 9th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    I used to work in a customer service call centre and it was one of the most frustrating experiences ever. Not because people were rude all the time but because we were forced to shove stupid products down other people’s throats all the time. So don’t think it’s only a hassle for you, but for us too.

    This would sound very much politically incorrect but the thing that bothered me the most when I got calls from English speakers (when I was in the Spanish customer service line, mind you, your mistake not mine and all that) was that they wouldn’t make an effort to try and listen to what you’re saying. I’m bilingual with little accent left and yet when I opened my calls in Spanish and then English most wouldn’t even care to listen to the english part before they either hung up on me or screamed that they wanted to speak with someone else.

    Also, don’t fuck with people who can screw you by a few clicks in their computers. Hah.

21. SW
    January 9th, 2008 at 11:33 pm

    It really gets frustrating when due to the language barrier, the reps just don’t understand your problem. I think my worst experience was with people in the Philippines, not India. No matter how many times I tried to explain to them why I couldn’t do what they said I should do, they just told me to do it. I repeatedly asked to be transferred to an American (which I know they could do) who would better understand my problem, but they flat out refused. Finally I hung up and hit the right key when calling back, so I got an American, who right away understood my issues.

22. Gisen
    January 10th, 2008 at 9:14 am

    I used to work as phone tech support for a large British ISP; I got up to supervisor so I had to take the really angry people from the front line agents, but I never really got stressed out about it; you can always put them on hold again if they won’t calm down or just cut them off if they won’t stop being unnecessarily abusive.

    Accents: I also had to take over a lot of calls from our agents who had strong accents- quite reasonably because I couldn’t understand some of them despite working with them every day. It’s got nothing to do with racism - I don’t even believe in the concept of race - but if you are not understandable then you shouldn’t be working on the phone. (The worst offender was actually a local with a really strong regional accent.)

    Having said that, I fully support giving any and all abuse to unwanted cold callers trying to sell you things. I have absolutely no sympathy for them and they should find another job.

23. Gisen
    January 10th, 2008 at 9:24 am

    The ISP I worked for had/ has 2 kinds of internet packages: business and home. The business desk, which I worked at, was based in the UK, but the home one was in India, so we sometimes had to call them and sort things out. Their entire attitude was wrong. They had a script and they stuck to it absolutely rigidly - even when speaking with another tech support agent - and would flat out refuse to consider actually doing any thinking on their own. Not saying all call centres are like that but that’s some of them are so utterly useless.

24. Pol x
    January 10th, 2008 at 11:24 am

    I am never happy to get put through to an Indian call centre.

    It has nothing to do with race or with accent, as most indians have the sort of English diction that make most English people sound like mumbling retards.

    No the problem for me is the that british european and american companies have fired all the British European and American people who did this job and farmed the work out to third world information sweat shops.

    At what point will these companies register the idea that if they keep pushing production to the 3rd world to reduce costs and maximise their profits by using labour that is paid so badly…

    WHO IS GOING TO BE LEFT TO BUY THEIR PRODUCE?

    If you take the jobs aay from Detroit, how can the people of detroit buy your stupid cars?

    Economic Self Inflicted wound.

25. Alexandra
    January 10th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

    I’ve been in Customer Service for almost 10 years, and I think I have been called every foul and disgusting name in the English language and several other languages as well. I don’t know what it is about a telephone, but for some reason people seem to think that if you are on the other end of a phone call you are somehow not human. Telephone sales and customer service is possibly the worst and most thankless job in the world.

    My father died and my mother lost her marbles when I was 17, forcing me to skip college and take care of my 4 younger sisters. Telephone work lets me make more than minimum wage so that I can feed my family. I am a decent, honest, hard-working person, but to listen to the people that I talk to every day you would think I was the worst kind of criminal. I have partial deafness in my left ear from people blowing air horns and whistles (or sometimes just screaming) when they answer the phone, or when they call our call center. I don’t like my job. I don’t enjoy calling people, or answering calls in a call center. This is not what I had hoped to spend my life doing. I still have one more sister and my own son to put through college, so it looks like I may be doing this for quite a while longer.

    If I was your daughter or wife you would think that people were awful, and rant and rave about the jerks that abound in our world, but since I am a faceless entity people treat me like I deserve abuse.

    Don’t get me wrong, I hate Indian call centers, because my job has been outsourced several times, causing me to have to start back at the bottom of the food chain and with decreased wages, but they are people and it isn’t their fault. Just like me, those people are just taking whatever work is available and tying to feed their families. When you get a call, how hard is it to just hang up the phone, instead of taking your self-righteous anger out on some poor slob who has learned to cringe every time he or she hears a phone ring? If you get an annoying voicemail… press the #7 to delete and move on with your life.

    On behalf of all the under-educated or under-employed people in the world, I sincerely apologize that our misfortune has caused us to interrupt your days. I apologize that sometimes when you answer the phone it is not a friend or loved one, but a bill collector, or a sales pitch. I know that it is easy to see us as horrible little caricatures of greedy villains, but we aren’t. We are your mothers, sisters, brothers,fathers, husbands, wives, and friends. So the next time you decide to take out your daily frustration on some hapless slob on the other end of a telephone, please remember what I told the last person who screamed at me to get a “real job”;

    “I spend 10 hours of my day, 5 days a week, doing something I hate, so that I can stay in a perpetual state of cyclical debt… sounds like a real job to me.”

26. Anieb
    January 11th, 2008 at 1:16 am

    I have had several frustrating connections to representatives in India. The main problem is that many of them don’t realize they are speaking too fast.

    I explain that they do pronounce words differently from the way they are pronounced in America, so I have to figure out what is being said and if they talk at high speed then I don’t have time to figure it out.

    Problem is, of course, that they don’t realize the pronunciation is at all different and is based on both the sounds of the mother tongue and a partial emulation of British pronunciation. I’m convinced that if training included talking at a slower, almost normal clip, there’d be less frustration.

27. sickb*stard
    January 11th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    I can see why people are upset over calling a local company and getting routed halfway around the world to speak with someone that has a thick accent or might not know exactly what your situation is, but…deal with it.

    That’s where the company you are choosing to shop from has decided to outsource their telephone jobs to. It sucks, but if you don’t like it, either don’t call the company or don’t shop their.

    On the other side of things, those Indians need to get a bit tougher. I’ve worked as a debt collector in the subprime (eg. bad credit) market and I had to deal with loads of jerks who would think it’s clever to yell, scream, blow air horns, and generally treat me like a jerk. But there was never an incident of ANYONE I knew of getting upset or having a heart attack or getting an ulcer from the job. You just need to have a tougher hide than most for telephone work.

28. an
    January 11th, 2008 at 1:13 pm

    I work in a call center in the Philippines. I think it’s a very stressful job that requires a lot of patience when you’re dealing with troubleshooting computer problems over the phone. A lot of the customers I talk with are americans and most of them are nice and are deceived that they are talking to an american because I don’t have a filipino accent when I talked to them in english. But I do feel sorry for my fellow agents (filipino & indians) who get discriminated because of their accents. Our salaries are low and we work at nights. I hope you can be more patient with us when you get routed to a non-american call center because all we want to do is help you with your problems. It’s not our fault US companies choose our countries for their customer support.

29. Yippee-Cay-Yay
    January 20th, 2008 at 9:09 pm

    Rude Callers Are Stressin’ Out Indian Call Center Staff

    Boo-freakin-hoo. How about Indian Engineers are stressin out American workers? I can’t tell you how many of my colleagues are worried about even HAVING a job over the next year. I work an 80-hour week typically. People I work with have to constantly pick up the pieces after receiving code written by Indian engineers, yet Mgmt still happily sends work over there (gotta get those stock options, boys!) Somebody said a bad word to you? Awww… Suck it up, Makhmoud. I’ve worked in Tech Support for five years and heard just about everything anyone could say. You can’t deal with it? Too bad.

30. Frank
    February 21st, 2008 at 3:30 am

    As a technical support representative here in the states I can understand some customer’s frustration at having to hurdle both a technical knowledge gap in addition to a language barrier when calling support. The customer is already anxious about the problem they are confronting without the added issue of repeating what they say several times, or asking for clarification. I do believe that some companies are starting to understand this and are moving call centeres back to the States, or other areas where the English speakers are more fluent. What is somewhat sad is that from personal experience many of the Indian technicians actually are quite knowledgeable and helpful. I think that diction classes for these call center employees provided by the company would go a long way toward relieving the stress of both the customer and employee. There are many ways a company could do this. One would be to offer online access to such training through a site such as Rosetta Stone. Another would be to have a daily class for their employees as an ongoing training regimen. Of course it is highly unlikely that this will happen as the greed of those compnaies far outweigh their concern for either the customer or the employee.

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