Thanks for phoning India

[boney_m]

BT Broadband help "Hello, my name is unpronounceable how can i help you today?"
Me "I lost the configuration from my broadband router, can you tell me the IP addresses of BT's DNS servers?"
BT "Are you getting any error messages when you try and use the internet?"
Me "Yes, i havent got the IP's of the DNS servers, its telling me nothing can be found"
BT "Could you remove the USB plug from your broadband modem, and plug it back in again please"
Me "All i need is the IP's of the DNS servers, then i'll be fine mate"
BT "We find that this often solves the error, could you remove the USB plug for your modem please"
Me "No, i havent got a USB modem, i've got a router. What i havent got is the IP's of the DNS servers. If you give me them i'll get off your case"
BT "When you remove and replace the plug from your USB modem, do you get any error messages?"
Me "Is the only English you speak written in a script in front of you?"
BT "Do you have a Firewall?"
Me "For all that is holy, please tell me the IP's of your DNS servers"
BT "Do you have a DNS problem?"
Me "Christ on a bike, yes, i need the IP's of your DNS servers please"
BT "I cannot give you that information at present as our system is down. Please ring back later"
Me "Are you winding me up?"
BT "No Sir, our link to the system is down"
Me - Hangs up totally devoid of a will to live.

Anyone reading from the Pakistani government, please rekindle any differences you may have, and drop some sunshine on India, especially if it is an airburst above any call center responsible for BT Yahoo Broadband

Rant over,

Boney

 

[CC_TA]

I had a similar one a couple of weeks ago trying to report a possible card cloner on a cash machine; got straight through to Islamabad, repeated the address, location and type of device over a dozen times just to be told; "I don't understand what you are saying!" So I apologized for speaking English and hung up - Knuts!

CC_TA

 

[Cpl_ripper]

W*g call centers p1ss me off
I'm forever getting calls from American life offering a free 1 month life cover, then wanting my bank account details. As if im going to give that to some muppet half way around the world.
Dell from un-understandable Irishman to even more un-understandable Indian man/woman.
Can't wait for the local police to set up call centers in India

 

[rabid_hamster]

Guys
if its any help the bank that I (unenthusiastically) work for is possibly (read probably) about to close the call centre in Pune, India because ..... any guesses? ...... No bugger can understand what they are saying and they cant understand any accent what so ever.
Management do surveys every month which prove customers are F'ed off with the poor service/communication problems but the indian sites are kept on since they only cost 1/10 what UK call centres cost but are 50-70% as effective.


ps: one of my mates did the BT outsourcing to India ... I'll send him your regards.

 

[Hitlerwasabitnaughty]

Chances are you may actually have been calling a call centre in Derby. I once worked for BT Business BB and know that BTYahoo! ISP has a lot of its residential Customer Care functions based there, and they employ a large amount of Asian staff, due to the make up of the local population.

2 Asian muslim guys, who did the suicide bomber bit in Israel a couple of years back, once worked there.

Coincidence is a funny thing isn't it?

 

[WhiteHorse]

It's no better when you work for a large telephone company, we've out-sourced our IT support to HP, guess where thier call centre is? Oh yeh, Dheli.


Took 12 calls and a formal complaint to HP before I got an honest answer and an apology for keeping me off the intranet for 4 days!

I'm told by our people that we are not happy with the Indian call centres but they are cheap!

One tip though, if you know your DW (jsp101) etc write in a similar matter, "I look forward to your assistance in this matter" etc. I was given this advice and bloody hell, got a reply back in record time, correct info and everything, they still respect the old civil service values in parts of India and being polite and curteous works wonders when using email.

 

[boney_m]

Chances are you may actually have been calling a call centre in Derby. I once worked for BT Business BB and know that BTYahoo! ISP has a lot of its residential Customer Care functions based there, and they employ a large amount of Asian staff, due to the make up of the local population.

Whilst i will bet good coin that this bloke was from India, i'm willing to accept that he was based in Derby or Leeds or Wales or anywhere. I'm not bothered by who answers the phone (we have a support company at work based in South Africa, your always guaranteed a decent chat about the rugby/cricket/football whilst you wait for their 1980's IT system to give them an answer).

My point is about Technical support. Thats how the lines are advertised. The person who answers the phone has absolutely no tech knowledge at all, and is reading stuff off a script. If you only want a simple answer, you have to go through pages and pages of script on their screen to get your answer - or not if their link back to the UK is down. Tech support is a bunch of arrse, it takes and gives nothing back while you pay local rate for the privilage. If the bloke has the ability to thread a sentence together in english, its becoming a bonus.

Boney

 

[CardinalSin]

Ripper - it's really difficult to concentrate on your text, due to those nifty little animations. Damn yer eyes...I must go and cleanse the streets.

 

[boney_m]

Cardinal,

http://usera.imagecave.com/****/BOUNCY.gif

While your about clensing the streets, go to india and do away with everyone working for BT Yahoo Broadband.

 

[Mr Happy]

A friend and I wrote this for the WSJ last year, having been a victim of an outsourcing and offshoring project.
Mr H

Off-shoring and Outsourcing: A Guide to Terminology
After the death of the Internet bubble and the events of September 2001, it has been imperative that financial institutions evolve to deal with the sharply declining workflow and income. No problem, management consulting companies have come out with a series of terms to help deal with these problems. We have the word Downsizing which means to get rid of all the people that do but leaving management who are now in a quandary because they don't have anyone working for them. We are not talking about low-level staff, but the ones that are costing so much money like the IT department. Not to worry, this leads us to the solution: the word Off-shoring which means essentially sending work to be done abroad for the price of a cleaner here. Then we have the word Upskilling which means that our offshore developer has actually provided us with cleaners and we now want skilled staff which will cost us more and take longer. Finally because the project has ran out of time and money, we have the word Descoping which means agreeing that "being taken to the cleaners" by the offshore company is now accepted with the realisation that the solution doesn't meet the original requirements. This may seem a pessimistic view, but at the moment there are a lot of firms who have dabbled in the outsource/offshore development have had unfortunate experiences. Many prefer not to talk about it because they are under the impression that overall it is very successful, but it is just them who have failed. Perhaps there should be a special forum, an Off-shorer’s Anonymous where these people can exchange experiences. The big consulting companies who have so promoted the idea are running large offshore delivery centres themselves so maybe they are not the best people to approach for advice on this The difference between outsourcing and off-shoring is distance. Outsourcing means bringing in external staff for a project. They may be working in house, they may be down the road or even further away. The point is that the staff are project based and can save you a bundle of money. Having temporary development staff is the best solution, but only when you have some of your own staff to help retain the product and system knowledge. The moment the work is happening outside your building, there is a problem with information transfer which has to be addressed in order for the project to succeed. This can even be a problem when the project team is split between two buildings in the same organisation. When you take major parts of the project team and place them in another country, the problems are magnified with the distance, the time and cultural differences. Off-shoring works, however only within certain parameters. We are surrounded by examples of successful off-shoring such as the computers with an American name but it was assembled in China. On a recent project with which we have had the pleasure of being involved, the offshore resource being provided by one of the big consulting companies produced about 46% of what was expected and only about 34% passed testing according to their own standards. In common with many outsourcing projects, we were told that the project will succeed no matter what. The business remains blissfully unaware of the problems and in the end will have no option but to accept what has been given to them. So the quality issues will be addressed by Deskilling and Outsourcing of the entire test process. If there is no effective quality management then you are free to accept whatever was produced. However, it might be advisable to take care that your CV is up to date before the business see it. When off-shoring must work, you must expect senior staff to spend a large amount of time supervising the projects and training the staff. This is one of the major costs with off-shoring, frequently overlooked and resulting in your staff spending considerable periods of time at the delivery centre looking after the project. These costs must be factored in up front so the real costs and savings of off-shoring are visible. The delivery centre must avoid being a silo and ensure that using ongoing quality management, dashboards and related technologies, the project management is kept informed as to project progress and quality. After all, perhaps the previously mentioned cleaners’ knowledge of object orientated methodology stopped at a mop and bucket.
It should be remembered that quality certification is not a one-off process and any company that follows a methodology must do so as an ongoing process. The client shouldn’t just rely on certificates, but should validate that a quality governance is in place by installing quality gates and verifying that a correct process is in place. Unfortunately, as the offshore staff become more skilled, they want to improve their income standard so they move around, so expect at least a 50% staff turnover over the life of a project, more if it stretches for longer than a year. Giving the offshore staff a crash course in credit risk derivatives is expensive and time consuming, particularly if it has to be repeated every six months. Then there are communications issues. Even if the offshore staff are working on-site, straight-forward concepts may need considerable explanation. In the financial markets many concepts are deeply interrelated and it becomes very difficult to concentrate on just one aspect. People need an overview, and this generally comes with what is euphemistically referred to as Investment Banking experience. It is sad to see an institution one moment desperately looking for people with experience and then next moment handing the work off to people at some offshore centre. Yes, the organisation may have worked on say IB projects before, but how many of the staff are still there with that experience and are they all now making pre-sales presentations? The last point is that your business processes become embedded in the program code and if you are lucky, the code may match the documentation, but it only starts this way. After successfully outsourcing and off-shoring your operation you may find that the only people who know your business processes aren't working for you. Another issue is that of downstream costs. Projects developed in-house are generally covered by service level agreements or SLAs. People already have leaned that life can be uncomfortable if a major system goes down and there is no agreement to support it. Often code is delivered from offshore without the same assurance, the idea is that in-house technical staff will take over the support and the costs for this will be worked out later. Immediately, we see why someone who is just shipping you code can save significant amounts of money. Better add the cost of the SLA up front, and don’t be surprised if you are charged more for supporting somebody else’s code. One solution here is to run the offshore delivery centre yourself. In such a case, you are responsible for ensuring that the right level of staff are employed and that employee turnover is minimised. It has the advantage in that the know-how is at least kept inside your organisation; however you now have a management chain spanning continents and cultures. It still may be an issue the knowledge behind your businesses process is now offshore. At this point it becomes advisable to close up shop and move offshore yourself to keep control of the process.

 

[Lairdx]

I hate the calls you get from indian call centres. One a few months ago went along these lines

Indian chap. "Hello Can I speak to Mr. Lairdx please"
me "Speaking."
"Hello Sir my name is Brian and I am calling.."
"Brian you say?"
"Yes my name is brian and I am wanting to tell you about a fantastic..."
"Brian? That's an unusual name in India isn't it? You are calling from india aren't you?"
"Yes sir I am. As I was saying My name is..."
"I don't believe you."
"I'm sorry sir?"
"I don't believe your name is Brian. I think that is just something you are told to say. What is your real name?"
"Actually my real name is Rhamajeet Muckjaree (spelling?) but I am calling to tell you...."
"Whoa hold on a minute. Do you really think I am going to enter into any form of business transaction with a bloke who has been on the phone for a minute and has already lied to me?"

Cnuts. telly Two I think the company was.

 

[Scotch_Mist]

BT's call centre is a real pain. The language barrier is terrible and I get very frustrated dealing with people who can't understand a word I say! However my ISP also has call centre support in India and they are really brilliant. English is obviously their first language and every operator is bright as well as unfailingly polite!
Obviously varying standards across the service.....or is BT just paying for cheapo labour....mmmm...

 

[Mr Happy]

I hate the calls you get from indian call centres. One a few months ago went along these lines

Indian chap. "Hello Can I speak to Mr. Lairdx please"
me "Speaking."
"Hello Sir my name is Brian and I am calling.."
"Brian you say?"
"Yes my name is brian and I am wanting to tell you about a fantastic..."
"Brian? That's an unusual name in India isn't it? You are calling from india aren't you?"
"Yes sir I am. As I was saying My name is..."
"I don't believe you."
"I'm sorry sir?"
"I don't believe your name is Brian. I think that is just something you are told to say. What is your real name?"
"Actually my real name is Rhamajeet Muckjaree (spelling?) but I am calling to tell you...."
"Whoa hold on a minute. Do you really think I am going to enter into any form of business transaction with a bloke who has been on the phone for a minute and has already lied to me?"

Cnuts. telly Two I think the company was.

In Brian's defence its very common for johnny foreigners to take anglo names when dealing with us. In Seoul I worked with Ja Ryung Koo, Ja Eun Yang, Ji In Jeong and Ju Hyun Doh, when dealing with me in meetings (english spoken) they were JR, Jane, Jean and June (check first two parts of the names above) to me and each other.

Personally I disliked it and tried to get them to use their own names, unfortunately, they then started that nasty habit of referring to each other as (in Korean) as Teacher/master, girl who operates the computer, girl who answers the phone and girl who gets the coffee. As a consequence we went back to names...



In India, where I worked for a substantial part of 2003 the guys would use their Indian names more often but it was common enough for them to again adopt an international name (insert Man U or cricketers names (Botham?) here).

Think about all those Bosnians you met, mikail was Michael who ran the bar outside of camp etc...

 

[smoojalooge]

Bloody indians staying over there and stealing our jobs

BT are in the process of getting rid of the indian call centre due to customer demand so make sure complain and speed the process along

 

[emptyeye]

Bloody indians staying over there and stealing our jobs

BT are in the process of getting rid of the indian call centre due to customer demand so make sure complain and speed the process along

There is also the small forgotten UK Data Protection Act, no UK company can garantee security of said documents in another country, and does the law extend to that country too?
Im in the IT business, and see many jobs for UK taught asians with 'mid european/atlantic' accents wanted for call centres in india, to give the intial impression you are speaking to Joe Snooks in Manchester and not Bombay, if its not a probelm, why does the industry want these people to talk that way?

On a funny point, my Mrs works in a insurance call centres here in the UK (boo..hissss) anyway, she tells me some guys phone up thinking shes in Bombay, asking how the weather is, hows eastenders these days, can they fly across to visit the call centre, they go all quiet when she says she hates enders and doesnt watch it, its raining there too and if they wish to fly, why not drive down instead..Doh

 

[Mr Happy]

Data security can be maintained, but firms don't often, a UK law would fix that.