Politics & Current Events
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Is it flameful of me if I want to talk to an American CSR?
OK, not even an American.
I don't care if you outsource your customer service to India or Mexico or the Philippines or wherever.
But hire people who can speak English well enough to be understood, and to understand me. Is that really unreasonable?
And AFTER eight minutes of automated voicemail BS that doesn't connect you to an operator when you press 0, #, * or say "I want to talk to a person" ?
I feel like this complaint is straight out of 2005 but I'm sick, I'm biitchy and I just want to fuckingtalk to someone about my problem that I can communicate with.
Re: Is it flameful of me if I want to talk to an American CSR?
I guess its only flameful if you're talking to some guy who is actually in Cleveland.
Otherwise, nah, I think its reasonable to expect competent customer service agents.
I mostly agree. I don't care where the person is actually located, but I think they should be able to speak English on a fluent level if they are manning an English-speaking customer service line.
The other thing I hate is when you call and they say they can't help you because they aren't in the US and don't have any authority. Ummmmm ok then. It is why I only call my student loan servicer during EST business hours, because I have learned that you get a US person then, and they are empowered to actually change things with your account.
I don't know; I think there are a lot of people worldwide who speak English just fine, but native English speakers have a bias against those with an accent.
I've heard people complain how they just can't understand their CSR, but I could understand them just fine. If you go in thinking you'll be underserved by an accented voice, you will be.
Not at all. Not only should they be able to speak English well enough to understand and be understood with ease, they should also speak it well enough to be able to respond to questions that aren't in their manual.
I got so frustrated with Office Depot's CSRs because they could not understand what I wanted. It was a somewhat irregular problem, apparently, and not in their little book. Not in book = can't help you. I went back to the store where I purchased the item in question and demanded that they either help me or call their customer service line themselves and resolve it.
My company has an overseas c/s dept. I used to work more closely with them, and I got the hell out because a) they were nearly impossible to work with and b) my phone was ringing off the hook with customers screaming along the lines of the op.
I fall somewhere in the middle - I've heard a lot of undue frustration and flat our lies from customers, with a thinly veiled undercurrent of "I don't like them cause they're brown". OTOH, there's a lot of shitty overseas call center work, and the blame for that goes right through the business higher ups to the consumer who gets what they pay for.
It's absolutely structured like what you see in Outsourced - there are A teams that cost more and have American accents and back stories, and there are C teams who can't write an email in English that I can understand. We've asked them eight ways from Sunday for the same thing over and over, and they never get it right. Then again, I have the same complaint about many of my US coworkers.
It's very much a business decision. We make a consumer product, and we have a piece of a department devoted to customer service. It's an operating expense. It's a hell of a lot cheaper overseas than it would be here. Hell, just the rent. Generally the things that bubble up come in the form of BBB complaints, letters to the CEO, and FB/twitter complaints. There are times we knowingly break our own policies, and even c/s says they'll monitor complaints and let us know if it's a problem.
Price is really the driving factor in our business. Our whole model is predicated on margins, and customer service an eat into that big time.
Yeah, I kind of agree. I've gotten CSRs with accents before. I've never had one who couldn't speak English fluently.
And reiterating their script/not going off script doesn't mean they don't understand English.
40/112
This. A lot of Filipinos are actually native English speakers. It's the same with Malaysians, but I'll stick to how it is in the Philippines because the OP specifically mentioned it. Just because someone speaks with an Asian accent and uses Asian-English sentence structure and syntax doesn't mean that they don't speak English or understand what you're saying.
DD #1 passed away in January 2011 at 14 days old due to congenital heart disease
DD#2 lost in January 2012 at 23 weeks due to anhydramnios caused by a placental abruption
This last too, this is totally a management issue, not a non-American issue. Management has given them specific training and authority. If your issue isn't one they see often enough to be part of the training - no matter how simple it seems to you - they likely will not be able to assist. And they are purposely given no real authority to do much. Whether you can get access to someone who does have more authority is dependent on the philosophy of the company, and won't change depending on where the call center is. Way back before we had a call center when I answered the phones myself, the higher ups still didn't want to be bothered with customers.
Anything you can achieve through hard work, you could also just buy.