O/T Companies with foriegn Call Centres

[Caveman]

zorri msut dsah pohne rninging.

 

[Beach Hut]

They have outsourced most of the calls handled in Derby, Newcastle, Cardiff and Plymouth to Bangalore, India.

Correct and our 2nd line IT Support is in Mumbai

 

[Infernal Optimist]

Do what I do close every account you come across with a foreign call centre. If everyone did this they would soon get the message that good service doesn't equate to exploiting some poor sod for peanuts or
expecting the UK customer to pay UK prices for service that cannot possibly do the job.

Mind you when you get some pillock in South Wales mumbling nonsense to you, don't blame me

 

[Yorkie]

I hate the way that they cannot deviate from their script.

At Yorkshire Electricity I worked in the Accounts dept. I used to deal with electricity bill enquiries specialising in people moving house. Gradually I dealt with direct debits etc and over 25 years I multi tasked as they call it.
From 1993 onwards it became a call centre.
I ended up with a supervisor aged 22 who was a 'yes' woman marking me out of 100 for every call (which was recorded) and I lost 5 points for every deviation from the 'script'
I knew twice as much about the job as she did but I had to follow the script or lose any bonus.

I detested it and it was only knowing that I was in line for thousands of pounds of redundancy and the freedom to move down south that made me stick the last 5 years.
It was hell on earth (and the customers weren't treated properly either)

 

[fatboy]

Sometimes when I don't have a lot of time I ring National Rail Enquiries and just want a quick answer to my query. Instead they read out their script and by the time they have finished my train has departed!

I do, however, like their current hold music.

 

[Crazy Cornish Gal]

Talking about scripts, my brother works in a call centre for all the stuff you see on the shopping channels.
He also has to stick to the script or lose out, he told me the other day that he got a serious repremand for failing to read one line, and they had been monitoring his calls all day.
He has now been told he will be made redundant in 3 weeks and all he will recieve is a weeks extra pay, needless to say he now doesn't give a shit.

Oh yes and i know someone with a First Direct account and they can't praise them enough.

 

[Ernest]

I am a foreign call centre in my spare time

 

[Crazy Cornish Gal]

As with my expiriences of call centres, well the mobile network '3' has it's call centre in India.
Much fun was had when i changed to a 3 account, spelling my name and address - nightmare, and even them he still got 'Brighton' as 'Brian' no joke!

 

[swindonseagull]

Do what I do close every account you come across with a foreign call centre. If everyone did this they would soon get the message that good service doesn't equate to exploiting some poor sod for peanuts

The reason the call centres are in india is the Low daily wage.India is cheap to live so therefore wages are less. So its not exploitation of the workforce at all.its the companys saving money by moving to a cheaper workforce..its called econimics. NOT Exploitation, could you imagine what the world would be like if a worker in India demanded British wages to live in India?

The demands here and elsewhere would just rise ..

some areas of the world are cheaper, like some areas of the Uk are cheaper than other areas.

Why do you think Indians and others work in the UK? and send money home??

 

[Gully]

CCG, what is it like living in Brian?

 

[Emily's Mum]

I worked for HSBC for 15 years & over the last 5 years more & more work has been outsourced. I have met quite a few of the people who work in the Indian call centres & found them to be very friendly & intelligent. However; I don't think you can train people to have the experience of the UK housing market, as the UK based staff have. The call centres are very good at doing the basic stuff like ordering cheque books & transferring funds, but when it comes to making decisions based on experience, it all falls apart.

The final straw for me was when HSBC's mortgage department transferred their death claims work to India: One memo to a branch asked if they had contacted Mr Boggs (deceased) to ask him how he was going to pay his mortgage now he was deceased!

 

[Bwian]

NTL's Indian workforce are frigging useless-if you ever need tech support, call before 8pm to be in with a chance of speaking to a Brit. After that, you'll get some Indian who likes to go through the whole script then tells you that the problem is your system "Because we are not knowing of any outtages in your part of Glasgow".

Glasgow? I'm in Guildford!

"Very sorry-your postcode starts with 'G'. Is there anything else I can be helping you with"?

Anything else? We haven't even got the original problem sorted out yet!

"I'm very sorry-I have done as much as I can: you must be calling the manufacturer of your cable modem".

IT'S AN NTL BOX!!!

"Oh-how can I be helping you"?

aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhh!

 

[bigc]

National Rail Enquiries.

I hate the way that they cannot deviate from their script.

I always use www.nationalrail.co.uk for that

 

[Spearritt of the Albion]

The reason the call centres are in india is the Low daily wage.India is cheap to live so therefore wages are less. So its not exploitation of the workforce at all.its the companys saving money by moving to a cheaper workforce..its called econimics. NOT Exploitation, could you imagine what the world would be like if a worker in India demanded British wages to live in India?

The demands here and elsewhere would just rise ..

some areas of the world are cheaper, like some areas of the Uk are cheaper than other areas.

Why do you think Indians and others work in the UK? and send money home??

It might not be exploitation of the Indian workforce but it is of ours. Beware if you are young as there may not be any decent jobs in 10 years time.

Large companies are forcing their employees to train Indians (especially in the States and the UK) and then transferring the work to Mumbai and such places. Once set up, the U.S. & British workforces (amongst others) are being made redundant. All in the name of bigger profits!

One sensible European country is unhappy with this situation and is doing something about it.

Now, you may think the French are stupid but they will not take any of this nonsense and are banning the practice (and they are talking about French speaking African nations not Indians where the accents are easier to detect!).

I read recently that in China all traffic is banned around schools when exams are being taken and kids not taking exams stay at home for the day. Their aim is to have a highly skilled workforce in just a few years so that they can take on the jobs of the West at wages that are perfectly acceptable to their subsidised inhabitants but peanuts to ours. What do we do in this country? We allow our stupid kids to set off fire alarms during exams - severly disrupting the thought processes of those kids who have worked hard for years for that one day!

This country has got to wake up, today, before it's too late!!!!

So don't talk to me about exploitation!!

Rant over

 

[Juan Albion]

The reason the call centres are in india is the Low daily wage.India is cheap to live so therefore wages are less. So its not exploitation of the workforce at all.its the companys saving money by moving to a cheaper workforce..its called econimics. NOT Exploitation, could you imagine what the world would be like if a worker in India demanded British wages to live in India?

The demands here and elsewhere would just rise ..

some areas of the world are cheaper, like some areas of the Uk are cheaper than other areas.

Why do you think Indians and others work in the UK? and send money home??

That's rather simplistic and not exactly accurate. It may be true of India and call centres to an extent, but there are plenty of examples of exploitation out there. Often the low wages are not so much to do with the cost of 'living' but because there is such high unemployment and desperation that they will work for anything. In many cases, such as sweat shops I visited, even the country in which they are based gets fleeced as they cannot charge the companies with any taxes or they would simply move somewhere else that will give them land tax-free.

 

[Shizuoka Dolphin]

Fact of the matter is, a good 60% of people in call centres are plebs who don't know what they're doing. If the call centre is 4 thousand miles away it makes matters worse, but not by much.

Half the people I worked with at ntl would have had problems using teletext, never mind sorting out a digital TV service...

 

[Gwylan]

Fact of the matter is, a good 60% of people in call centres are plebs who don't know what they're doing. If the call centre is 4 thousand miles away it makes matters worse, but not by much.

Half the people I worked with at ntl would have had problems using teletext, never mind sorting out a digital TV service...

That's too true. Call centres have always been awful and moving them to India seems to make little difference. Someone mentioned Dell earlier but I remember dealing with Dell about six years ago (before they moved to India) and they were notoriously bad. I'm currently having a ding-dong battle with NTL, a company that is seemingly set on employing only halfwits, and their call centre is not abroad.

Oh, and for those people who mentioned First Direct. I applied to open an account with them and they rejected me, saying I didn't fit their customer profile. As I was a home owner on nearly twice the average salary and with no debt defaults, it did make me wonder what sort of customers they wanted. But if their aim is to keep a smaller customer base, then it's obviously very easy to maintain good customer relations.