Foreign Call Centres

[Ettie]

Was talking to a lady from a foreign probably Indian call centre on Friday about a clients mortgage,
and it got me thinking.

Quite a number of popular uk businesses use call centres abroad.  A lot of them for banking, insurance or mortgages,
usually complicated stuff, not anything simple or straightforward, where communication issues don't matter so much.
So once you have got through the push this button if you want to lose the will to live etc, you then get someone who
talks at warp 9 with a heavy accent and (usually) lack of patience.

I started to wonder what it would be like if Indian or other foreign businesses used English call centres for their work and how
their communities would view this.  Perhaps the time of the Scouse call centre is about to come of age.

Imagine a Scouse emergency services call centre.  Works perfectly in the UK, would it work as well abroad ? 
The "Awrite, awrite, Cam Down ! Cam Down ! " would work, but what about a question ? "Is the la bevvied luv ?"
You could end up with 2 heart attacks for the price of one. 

[Yokel1]

Pet hate of mine is loosely based around this -  I log on to their (whoever it is’s) website and click on help, and it has a number of automated question/answer responses.  It can be just straight Q&A or driven by a search engine, but sex it up all they want, it’s still an index driven diy guide.  A good example of this is “Ask Lynn about Weessex Water”:

http://www.wessexwater.co.uk/default.aspx#

Now, it is very rare that I can get an answer in this way because, quite honestly, I’m a pretty smart guy and if I have a question it’s sure to need personal attention. 

So, try to find the contact helpline number and you’ll get a series of numbers, none of which will appear to get you to where you want.

So you ring one of them – eneter all your details via keypad, go through 17 different options (“Press 2 If you need to unblock your lavatory and you have blonde hair”) and they transfer you to another number, then you get transferred again, then again (all the time with long periods on hold listening to Richard Clayderman and some robot voice telling me they value my call – obviously not enough to have a real voice telling me that), and finally you get to someone, get half way through whatever it is you need to do and the person on the end of the phone says “Oh, I can’t do that bit” and transfer you to someone else. 

Ultimately you don’t know who you are speaking to, whats going on, what number to dial when they don’t do what they said they would, and your call has been recorded for training purposes. 

Worse one yet was our mortgage people took nearly £1000 off us last month by mistake – their error -  and it took us hours on the phone and a fortnight to get it back, not even a proper apology – they couldn’t give a flying copulation. 

I can’t complain about Wessex water though, I emailed them for a water quality report and an indication of alkalinity expressed as Cac03 and it came back within a couple of hours, with a personalised email.

We are upton scudamore – I expected  alkali water but “”The average alkalinity of the water in your area is 229 mg CaCO3/l””, I target 100mg for beer making so I think I am going to start treating the water!!!

[Ettie]

some robot voice telling me they value my call – obviously not enough to have a real voice telling me that

 

I often find the bank asking me to type in my account number etc, and then they ask you again when you get through. Totally pointless..

I noted your comment on the water. 
Do you know anything about nitrate levels ? Keeping a fish tank, I was trying in vain to get the levels down with water changes, but when I eventually tested a sample out of the tap, I found there were nitrates in before I even started.  

[Yokel1]

Date Processed    11/01/2010    10:49    
Water Supply Zone Summary          
Date range selected: From 01/01/2009    To    31/12/2009          
44000030 ZONE 30 UPTON SCUDAM                
 
2503    Nitrite    7    0.5    mg NO2/L    0.0    < 0.01    < 0.01    0.02    
2504 t    Nitrate    7    50    mg NO3/L    0.0    7    12    22    


....send me an addy and I'll send you the report - Leigh park is zone 30.