The View From the Ground At an Indian Call Center 214
A feature story in Mother Jones gives a fascinating inside look at what it's like to work in a Delhi call center. In this area alone, says the author, "100,000 call-center agents make their living selling vitamins to Britons or helping Americans troubleshoot their printers. I am almost certainly the only one who acquired his conversational skills accidentally — by being born in the United States." The slots at the call centers are limited and highly sought; the training is intense, and the infrastructure is poor.
Re:Intense training? (Score:5, Informative)
All they know how to do is follow their troubleshooting script, they've likely never used or have even seen the product you're having trouble with.
I can only speak for the two call centers I worked at right out of college (and the two teams I was on) but that's not always true. We knew the products and services we supported inside out, it was just that we often weren't allowed to fix problems (sometimes we were locked out of systems, other times it was just that they would check the logs to make sure people didn't make certain changes to connections).
When talking to others who have worked in tech support I've found that this is surprisingly often the case, they knew a lot more than they were allowed to let the customer know. The problem is of course that there's often no way around this, the guy knows he needs to keep his call times down and that the boss will be really pissed if he actually turns on interleave on your DSL connection, he must go through the script and then escalate it to a 3rd line tech who opens up the same tool the 1st line guy used and clicks the "interleave" checkbox. Have fun waiting two to three business days for that to happen...
Re:Intense training? (Score:5, Informative)
This was often the case when I worked at Dell. If the hardware guys in India were past their quota of dollars in parts to send for the day they would hang up on customers. I worked in paid software support, so that wasn't usually something I saw unless I called on behalf of a customer to get something fixed. The last time that happened to me it resulted in me learning how to exchange a laptop myself by request of my superiors.
That said, a huge number of them really were useless. I got told to confim a part number with hardware support before transferring the lady who wanted it to spare parts. The guy on the other end took my description and part number and then came back with the number for a power cable! The Indians on my team hated these guys too, so it seemed to be partially a corporate culture problem (despite that being a Dell-owned facility) in addition to a regular accent/culture problem.
Re:The real "problem" (Score:4, Informative)
I am a supervisor at a call center in Mexico City.
It is not uncommon for americans to hang up if they find out the 1-800 number they are calling goes to Mexico. I imagine it is worse for India.