Outsourcing tech support ( non-English speaking countries)

[Miss Chicken]

The two ISPs I have used since I have been on the internet both outsource their tech support to Asian countries - the first to India, the second one to Malaysia.

I had to call tech support a couple of weeks ago and I could barely understand the accent of the guy I had to talk to. I was very frustrated and I know that many many Australians get as frustrated with this as I do. Feel free to bitch if you have the same problem.

What I would really like to know is - does outsourcing like this only happens in English speaking countries. Do members here who live in Scandanavian countries, France, the Netherlands, Germany get someone from their own country when they phone tech support?

 

[Noname Given]

Re: Outsourcing tech support

The two ISPs I have used since I have been on the internet both outsource they tech support to Asian countries - the first to India, the second one to Malaysia.

I had to call tech support a couple of weeks ago and I could barely understand the accent of the guy I had to talk to. I was very frustrated and I know that many many Australians get as frustrated with this as I do. Feel free to bitch if you have the same problem.

What I would really like to know is - does outsourcing like this only happens in English speaking countries. Do members here who live in Scandanavian countries, France, the Netherlands, Germany get someone from their own country when the phone tech support?

Damn, thy SHOULD have outsourced to India, where they take great steps to make the tech sound like he/she is 'local' to your region. I work in the IT industry (and thankfully due to the nature of what I do, it was determined by upper management long ago that outsourcing my class position wouldn't be possible - and hopefully that won't change for another 15 or so years) - but to answer your question, IT tech outsourcing happens to some degree in all major western countries.

 

[Shaytan]

What I would really like to know is - does outsourcing like this only happens in English speaking countries. Do members here who live in Scandanavian countries, France, the Netherlands, Germany get someone from their own country when the phone tech support?

I often get someone from north Africa with a "strange accent" who are speaking a "strange French"...sounds like French, has French words in it but means nothing to me.
That said, if they outsource in Quebec, I wouldn't understand too...

 

[trekkiedane]

I think the fact that less than 6 million people on this planet speak Danish has left me in the lucky position where I can say that I have never, nor am I likely to ever, experience the joy of my language being shredded by a foreigner trying to help me with anything.

 

[Sky]

I know that there are large tech support centers in Ireland and Holland hiring Scandinavians and Finns to answer tech support calls from those countries.

(I once called Sun Microsystems and my call was routed to somewhere in India. I was very tired - had been working on a crashed server for 24 hours or so - and could not stop giggling at the accent of the helpful support person on the phone. His accent reminded me too much of Goodness Gracious Me...)

 

[jamestyler]

I've always had a lot of respect for such people. They get paid terribly and they have to learn the language (not always brilliantly, though) to do the job whilst dealing with a lot of anger and frustration. Not an easy job.

Ages ago I was working in a call centre with an Asian girl who had a very thick accent. She would get dreadful abuse over the phone for (to the callers, anyway) not being British.

 

[Count Zero]

Since there aren't that many German native speakers, and all of them live close to each other in countries with a similar standard of living, outsourcing support doesn't make much sense.

 

[Miss Chicken]

I've always had a lot of respect for such people. They get paid terribly and they have to learn the language (not always brilliantly, though) to do the job whilst dealing with a lot of anger and frustration. Not an easy job.

That is the reason why I try to be polite despite my frustration. I am actually far more annoyed at the firm for outsourcing than I am at the people taking the calls.

 

[Deimos Anomaly]

I imagine that it would be hard to outsource the tech support of countries whose language is not also widely spoken in some third world or developing nation somewhere.

Take say German for example. There are no countries other than Germany, Austria, Lichtenstein and Switzerland where it is a major language. They never had much of an overseas empire.

In the late 1800s / early 1900s before WWI they had Namibia and a couple of other places but they never held them long enough for German to be left there as a legacy language. They were taken by France and Britain after WWI.

So basically there are no developing nations to where it would be suitable to outsource German tech support. They're lucky that way.

American / British / Australian tech support gets outsourced because there are an arseload of countries here there and everywhere which, due to being dominated for a long time by the vast British Empire, have been left with the English language as a legacy.

 

[CommodoreKong]

When I had to call Microsoft when my 360 red ringed it was a very frustrating experience, the person on the other end of the line had major problems speaking English. Sometimes though you get lucky and get a US call center but I didn't.

On the other hand when my Wii broke it was a very pleasant experience, almost no time on hold and when the guy picked up he was obviously a native English speaker. When I explained the problem he immediately agreed it needed to be fixed without going through any stupid steps to fix it like with my Xbox. Plus since I had a MyNintendo account they just pulled all my info from that and I didn't even need to tell them my address.

Nintendo easily has some of the best tech support of any company, from what I read they will often agree to fix things out of warentee and Nintendo of America call centers are only in the US.

 

[MANT!]

Dell Computer had outsourced Tech Support to India some time ago..I was the victim of one person that was totally incompetent, at the time, my computer couldn't see a portion of it's hard drive therefore I called up the tech support number. the man's English was horrible, he was rude and insulting and he lied to me several times then told me that I was "just a stupid American" and hung up on me.. I called Dell Corporate, complained about my treatment and had a computer tech come to my house the very next day..whereupon he replaced the hard drive and transferred the information from the working parts of the drive to the new one..

perhaps they needed to screen their employees better..

 

[Deimos Anomaly]

Sometimes I think half the time the people in India or wherever must be just random joes with no computing background, plunked down in front of a phone with a series of flow charts telling them what to say in response to what the customer says. If your problem strays outside what their flowcharts cover, they're fucked. And so are you.

 

[FPAlpha]

Living in Germany and so far had only clear speaking germans on the phone.

Maybe if it's a deeper technical problem they forward it so some asian or indian tech centre to solve it but i'm not aware of it.

When i worked in the data center of a big software company we had to deal sometimes with our indian office when they had office hours and it would get sometimes so bad, i.e. such a bad accent that he was hardly understandable to speak english, that i'd make a small lie telling him that the line was bad and that he should write me an email.

 

[Star Wolf]

I have two relatives who work in the call center industry in Manila. Verizon if any one has dealt with them. And a third who teaches English to Koreans.

 

[Holdfast]

Sometimes I think half the time the people in India or wherever must be just random joes with no computing background, plunked down in front of a phone with a series of flow charts telling them what to say in response to what the customer says. If your problem strays outside what their flowcharts cover, they're fucked. And so are you.

The thing that gets me is the disjointed nature of it all.

Many bits of software have a "Troubleshooting" facility either in the software or online. You work through lots of the flowchart and eventually get stuck. Then you ring up Tech Support and you start from square one of the flowchart again. Surely there must be an electronic way to update whoever you call up with what stage of the flowchart you've reached, showing them what you've done so far and showing them any steps or paths you skipped or just haven't done. The calls would be much briefer, the frustration at the language problem less and both company and caller would save money.

Either that, or they should just publish the entire damn flowchart (not a crippled troubleshooting version) for online download and let users work through it themselves. Stick a big "we're not responsible if you screw up by following the advanced bits incorrectly" disclaimer on the front page if they're really worried about what users might do.

 

[FPAlpha]

Happened to me recently.

My internet connection broke down out of nowhere. I checked cables, restarted the router and checked everything network related on my computer before calling my ISP.

The lady basically tried to walk me through step by step again.. she almost asked me if my computer was plugged in and i needed all my restraint not to tell her i've worked in IT and networks.

I don't blame her since she has to assume i'm a total noob but it was still annoying. Finally she realized it was a technical problem at their end and she placed a ticket with their technical service.

 

[WillsBabe]

I get frustrated calling Asian tech support or customer services not because I can't understand their accents but because I'm concerned that they won't be able to understand my accent, which is reasonably pronounced Lancashire (think Christopher Eccleston). Still they always seem to manage it. In fact the last time I had to phone my bank the Indian tech support lady offered to sort out a problem noone in branch had ever bothered to.

 

[lennier1]

It´s fairly common.
Strangely when calling German business-level tech support I´ve ended up in India (Dell) and the Czech Republic (Sophos) but when calling English ones it´s always in the UK or Canada (at least so far).

 

[Count Zero]

The lady basically tried to walk me through step by step again.. she almost asked me if my computer was plugged in and i needed all my restraint not to tell her i've worked in IT and networks.

I don't blame her since she has to assume i'm a total noob but it was still annoying. Finally she realized it was a technical problem at their end and she placed a ticket with their technical service.

I usually avoid that by blurting out what I have already done, so this has never happenened to me. You should have told her you've been through the first steps already. I've worked at a call center and you wouldn't believe what kind of stupidity one sometimes has to deal with. With some callers I wondered how they actually manage to get through life.

It´s fairly common.
Strangely when calling German business-level tech support I´ve ended up in India (Dell) and the Czech Republic (Sophos) but when calling English ones it´s always in the UK or Canada (at least so far).

They have German speaking call centres in India?

 

[lennier1]

It´s fairly common.
Strangely when calling German business-level tech support I´ve ended up in India (Dell) and the Czech Republic (Sophos) but when calling English ones it´s always in the UK or Canada (at least so far).

They have German speaking call centres in India?

At least German-speaking call center workers. When even small companies buy several thousand Euros of hardware and software from them every year the least they can expect is phone support in their own language. Although I usually prefer to let them put me through to the English section since we´re only using English software anyway (faster availability of bugfixes and better chance to find good howtos on Google).