Offshore Call Centres – Oh My!

[angeljs]

I understand companies wanting to keep costs down by outsourcing customer support, but I firmly believe that in some cases this can only hurt the company involved. I’ve had many occasions where this has affected me in the past, but today I’ve had to deal with 2 different companies, both of which had terrible support, mainly because I couldn’t understand the operators.

The first one involved a payment I should have received, but didn’t. The lady I was put through to was obviously a young mother working from home, which is great, but her baby was constantly squawking in the background, and the lady herself had no idea how to handle my call. I had already explained to her why I called, but there were long silences with her clicking her tongue and whispering under her breath. She then told me things I’d already told her at the start of the call, and things went downhill from there. It wasn’t a great line, anyway, and the distractions and stress of trying to understand her made me give up completely.

The second call involved a monitor I’ve been trying to return to Currys for the past few weeks. I purchased it in January, but it had dead pixels, so they sent out a replacement. This, too, had the same issue, so I put in a refund request. Silence. Then I put in another request a couple of weeks later. Silence. Frustrated, I called them, only to be transferred to a man who spoke so rapidly in such broken English over a bad line that he actually ended up frustrated with me because I had to keep asking him to repeat things. He even told me to get up and move around the house for a better connection! He ended up jabbering something before putting me through to lady with a slightly better English accent, but she then said she had to transfer me to the right department. After a couple of minutes on hold, a gentleman came on the line with such a garbled sentence I just gave up. Honestly, I couldn’t even catch one word of what he said, so I just ended up hanging up and trying their webchat. That’s a whole, other story!!

The top and bottom of it is this: outsourcing your customer support is something companies should think about carefully and take very seriously. If your customers have bad support experiences, it will completely put them off and they will take their business elsewhere. Maybe then you’ll begin to understand that trying to save a few quid could cost you a whole, lot more in the long run!