How Many People Have Trouble With Out Of Country Customer Service?
Posted by China Sourcing CommentatorNov 27
Companies are out sourcing customer service because it is cheaper, but they do not teach the people proper American english speech. I can’t understand what they are saying half the time. How many of you all have had a similar problem?
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JC Penney and my local cable/internet company do this. HOW can you expect to help me with a high speed internet problem/malfunction if I can’t friggin’ understand what you’re telling me to do??? I think it’s incredibly annoying. I found out though that if you ask to speak with a supervisor, you might have to go through one or two more non-English speaking people, but you WILL eventually get to someone who’s in an office located in the US.
i had the same problem for example the people in highschool that take ESL are expected to the the Hspa and the SAT which is a very hard level of english to them so yea we all have it honey
I don’t have problems myself, but I know many impatient people do.
I think the impatience is the main thing. It’s like a cultural gap that fails to export with the work.
It’s on two sides.
First, (and I was in this service industry for a long time) a lot of people don’t know how to talk to customer service reps in a way that doesn’t wind up kicking them in the behind later. Most people working as foreign CSRs to Americans just don’t understand why they should serve such poor telephone manners.
I had a banking CSR who simply couldn’t speak English at a quick pace. I said the right things to get her to slow down and understand she had an impossible accent, but I could tell she was harried and hadn’t heard this for the first time. If I was anything less than totally nurturing and cordial, I could easily have been hung up on. I just knew it.
Second (and this is the bigger problem) the companies hold these contracts (to serve the companies by serving us) because of performance benchmarks based on serving the most customers at a time. That is translated into a score called Call Time Average. If you’re an employee with a high call-time average, your job is on the block. The company doesn’t like you. So you as a CSR are highly motivated to keep your call time down and thus you don’t perform as well and thus the not-as-good service gets complained about and picked apart as being an export problem, when in fact if the service was excellent you wouldn’t care where it came from.
Something for international CSR service providers to think about.