Customer Support and Accents
Written by Confusion support on February 21, 2008 – 12:16 pm -
I can’t emphasize enough how irritating, confusing and ridiculous phone support is nowadays for just about any product! I recently had a problem with Expedia and had to call for support on a billing problem. As usual I got the, apparently mandatory, Indian type person on the phone. As usual they could barely help me, had trouble understanding what I was trying to explain, and I could not understand everything they were saying (due to the accent). What in God’s name is wrong with the management of American companies nowadays! Can’t they see that good phone support is one of the most important aspects of continuing to get customers? Are they trying to frustrate customers and drive them away?
Why would you hire foreign employees to handle English speaking customer problems, knowing that there will be a communication breakdown? That’s just plain stupid! Yes, we all know they are saving money by hiring a group of Indian employees residing in India to handle customer calls (many people don’t realize these call centers are actually physically located in India). But the negative impact, at least in my opinion, is huge. I don’t want to buy anything anymore, especially a service, because the frustration of trying to get a problem resolved speaking to a person with an accent is way too stressful! And you know that you have a 99% chance that anytime you call the customer service of a large company you will have to talk to a person with an accent! The problem doesn’t arise as much with smaller companies.
Needless to say, I spent hours (no lie) on the phone with Expedia trying to explain to an Indian woman what my question and problem was. I tried saying it different ways, at different speeds, different pitches and with different intonations. She just kept repeating the same information over and over as if she couldn’t figure me out either or had no idea how to resolve the problem (which was actually simple, and the next night a different person resolved it in less than 5 minutes). The problem was never resolved with the first phone call due to the communication breakdown. Finally she gave up and claimed the system was down and someone would call me back or email me. An obvious lie. They never called back. This type of thing has happened to nearly every English-speaking American I know who has called any customer service and had to speak to someone with an accent. This needs to stop.
Posted in Service Confusion |
February 21st, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Jason Rakowski
February 21st, 2008 at 2:01 pm
THis is what is wrong with EXPEDIA: http://www.expedianews.com
They are scamming people. I wa sone of their victims . THey tried to scam me once (1254.95 U$D) and failed miserably. Click on my websiteto read the details of my case.
Good luck