Comment by JamesBarney
4 years ago
It's not just racism. I cringe when I hear a strong accent on a call center call but that's not because I dislike the person on the other end. It's because it's a signal of how much the company cares about support. And as a general rule of thumb they are offshoring their call center not to increase quality but to reduce costs. And this means you're going to have fight your way through 3 layers of support before you get to anyone who know what they're doing, and has the power to fix your problem.
Of course this isn't always true. There are definitely some US call centers that are awful and some stellar offshore ones, but as a general rule of thumb this seems to be true.
But your reasoning is still riddled with assumptions, namely that "If I hear someone answer the phone with an Indian accent, it means I'm dealing with a low-skilled/low-paid outsource worker who is going to waste my time." Here's why these assumptions are flawed:
1) As I already mentioned, we had foreign-born workers living in the US, with accents. They were highly-skilled, highly-qualified, and getting the same wage as all of our other US colleagues.
2) We had coworkers in India at all levels of support, L1-L3. I'm sure payband was the motivating factor in their hire, but timezone availability was a large consideration as well. And they were eminently qualified: some of them could run circles around me from a knowledge perspective.
3) The kernel of truth which you may have touched upon and which some of our customers may have inferred is that for historical reasons, most of our L1's were in India and most of the L2's or L3's were American. So yes, if you got a guy with an American on the phone, he was probably going to be better-equipped to solve your problem--because he was an L2/L3. But the reason that guy didn't answer the phone had little to do with how much the company cares about support; it was because the L2's had more important shit to do, like filing bug reports, or code diving, or debugging. And if I'm interrupting a GDB session to take a call, I expect that an L1 has done the bare minimum of triaging first to ensure that I'm not answering a question that could have been resolved by RTFM.
We can argue all day about whether to call these assumptions "racism" or not, but I would argue that whatever their origin, they feed into that sense of customer entitlement that leads to customers screaming at my colleagues over the phone as soon as they hear an Indian accent. And that's horseshit.
I'll leave you with a final example: we had a very irate CEO customer once in a conference call for a longstanding issue, and the call on our end included several product support leads, managers, and developers. At some point we decided to bring the company's Director of Software Engineering onto the call to try to calm the customer down. The director had an Indian name and was physically in our office but was introduced by name rather than title. The CEO responded by saying, "I don't wanna talk to some freaking guy in Bangalore!"
1) There exist many high skilled and qualified foreign born workers in the US. Agreed
2) There are lots of qualified people in India. Agreed
3) Screaming at anyone on the other side of the phone is horseshit Agreed
Companies either see support as a cost center or a differentiator. Those that see it as a cost center are less likely to invest in providing top tier support and more likely to offshore their support.
Now I'm sure there are companies that offshored not to save costs but to increase quality but they are rarer. And they are hamstrung by the existing experience of customers that expect offshore support to be worse.
If for historical reasons all L2-L3 support was offshore and L1 support was onshore, then people would breath a sigh of relief when they heard the accent.
This is what it is for me.
Take, for instance, a company like Crutchfield. Their entire call center is based out of New Jersey or something like that. The important part is that it's in-house. They are all extremely knowledgeable and powerful to help you out.
If it's out-sourced to another company or country, the result is the same. They mostly can't do anything.
As a counterpoint, my company has outsourced major parts of its internal IT support to the Philippines, yet my experience is always as good as how it was before they did so.
If they can do that for internal support, it should be possible for external as well?
You might have missed the last line of my comment :)
> Of course this isn't always true. There are definitely some US call centers that are awful and some stellar offshore ones, but as a general rule of thumb this seems to be true.
Sure, but it’s much cheaper to have crap support that can’t help you. For many companies it’s a plus if they can cheaply waste your time so much you won’t call again next time.
There are people with strong accents in the US working customer service.
True, but maybe 10% of people in the US have a strong foreign accent where as 90% of people who live in a foreign country have a strong foreign accent(to the US ear).
Globalization :)