I am so sick of dealing with Foreign Call Centers!!!

[KansasVoter]

Dell and Xbox 360 Support in the last month has been a nightmare! The communications issues were really bad.

They all were extremely polite and very nice.

But even the ones I understand do not really understand how we use English. The words are there but out of context. And they cannot get off the script or they totally become worthless.

What really pisses me off it that Dells Premium Support, which costs a lot more money, advertises USA based Support. If Dell think the foreign call centers are as good as the USA then why do they advertise USA based support as being better? Amazing.

I would still not be happy with Foreign Call Centers if they were perfect because I want Americans getting the jobs. But when it is outsourced and horrible it really pisses me off!!

[DJ13]

1. Imm serry, for a responze push 1

[KansasVoter]

2. +1

[butterfly77]

3. K&R!

[hendo]

4. Most tech support people for those companies

don't know anything regardless of what country they are in. IBM has all of their tech support people in the US and they also cannot stray from their script. Heck, they still read through their damned script if I have already told them that I have done something already.

This isn't so much an outsourced tech support issue as a tech support issue in general.

[bigwillq]

5. I don't mind if the person has an accent if they're calling

from within the United States. But it bothers me when I ask them "where are you calling from?", and they tell me "Brazil" or "India". That makes me upset because, like you, I want an American to have that job.
I know a lot of US citizens that have accents, and there's nothing wrong with it. Although I am not sure if customer service is always the best job for someone with an accent. Not trying to hate here, but we have to know our limitations.

I am not sure if they're suppose to tell me where they're calling from, but everyone has when I ask.



DELL is the worst! Their customer service is awful.

[iamjoy]

6. Kindly Do The Needful...

and revert to same

[Sal Minella]

11. Thank you for contacting us and and first let me say how

I am so very sorry you have experiencing difficulties with the accessing.

I just went through this with PayPal. After a long series of repetitive e-mails, they finally gave me to somebody who wrote English and could understand the problem and advise me how to fix it.

[tritsofme]

7. I usually ask to speak to someone based in North America.

Admittedly I don't make these sorts of calls often, but thus far my request has not been denied.

[KansasVoter]

8. Wow, did not know that was an option. I will try it.

[dixiegrrrrl]

10. It is an option with some companies, DISH for instance.

I am always polite and put on my "little old lady" voice, tell them I am very hard of hearing and could they please connect me to someone in the states.
If that does not work, my Southern accent can get so thick they cannot understand me!

[femrap]

13. Cool....

very good idea!

[Warpy]

9. Check and see if there's an online chat format for help

I've found that to be much more helpful in the past, mostly because they assume if you're smart enough to access such a format, you're smart enough to have jiggled all the plugs first to make sure it's not just a loose connection somewhere.

It eliminates the phone trees and people with thick accents and improbable names. People online at a keyboard are more likely to let you cut to the chase than go through a protocol set up for morons.

My major problem with offshored help lines (other than the people that were thrown out of work here) is that their telephone lines are substandard and that adds to the difficulty in understanding so many of them. You're listening to a thick accent through the sound of frying eggs.

[uncommon]

18. Oh good grief - these are no better, and they can take HOURS.

I used the Comcast one a little while back to ask a simple question and ended up in a 2 hours circular hell that kept seeming like it would end soon but it just kept going.

[Warpy]

20. I've had exceptionally good luck with them, much better than the tech on the phone

usually because I'm not trying to talk over the tech to tell him what possibilities I've already eliminated in trying to fix it myself.

[TBF]

21. I dealt with someone on Norton chat today -

it was a foreign name that responded. I kept asking for a refund and he/she kept saying things like "I could send you the disk - and then there would be no refund. Is that ok?". I had to type "JUST SEND ME THE REFUND" in caps repeatedly several times before he/she gave up and activated the refund.

So annoying. Not the fault of the worker though - I'm sure they are trained to respond accordingly.

[Warpy]

22. Yes, they are, and it would have been just as annoying on the phone.

That's something I've noticed, also, the chat format techs use their own names instead of trying to convince you they're Ken and not really in Calcutta.

[Gman]

12. Tier 1 support can't do anything that doesn't fit the script or flow chart

and it seems that no matter what, some other manufacturer is the problem and not their equipment.

[SoCalDem]

14. Hello..my name is Jose

:)

[XOKCowboy]

15. HP now ships 2 day to the repair center and FedX Ground back to the customer

When I say 2 Day shipping to the repair center that's actually 4 days since they have to send you their special box (also 2 day delivery). This is after spending an hour and a half convincing several "support technicians" in India that it was broken and it was under warranty.

I'd sent my last HP laptop in for service and it was overnight each way. Now the policy has changed and as a result it took a total of 26 days to get my laptop back. I only need it for my business and communicating with friends and family.

What's funny is that HP actually sent me an email during this fiasco asking how I felt about my recent use of their warranty repair service. They were even nice enough to provide a number to their Executive Customer Response line. Woo Hoo! I took advantage of that. I told the lady that I would do my best not to resort to profanity and I did but I let her know just how displeased I was with their "service". At that time it was 14 days since I'd first called HP and my laptop was in a trailer on it's way to Maine due to an HP clerical error. I was a little pissed.

The nice lady who answered the phone at the ECR line did one thing for me. She gave me a case number and a lady named Amanda in the Central Time Zone to handle my case. Amanda and I got to know each other very well because I called her every morning when she got to work. Since a FedX ground package can be on a truck for up to a week there was nothing much either of us could do but I got my point across and when it finally was returned to HP she got it back to me overnight. She even got HP to extend the warranty for another year mostly because I never gave her a hard time.

OK I'll step off my soapbox now. My point is that when I talked to HP's offshore "customer service" all I got was a rote list of options. It was only after I talked to someone here stateside that I got something done. One other thing that might have helped is I kept reminding them that Mac had an overnight shipping policy each way. They really couldn't argue with that.

[sohndrsmith]

16. How do you know they're foreign? Last I checked, American citizens have the

right to have an accent whether born here and raised with non-English speaking parents, or because a US citizen the hard way.

Do they (or in this instance, Dell) actually provide the locale of their call centers for you?

If so, where are they located? I'm curious...

[dixiegrrrrl]

17. If you ask where they are located, they usually tell you.

Sometimes you have to be insistant.
Usually when I casually ask, they automatically respond with location.

[CRK7376]

19. We have a horrible

time when we call Customer Service for Windstream. My wife will go nuclear nearly everytime. But I'm sure our accents drive the Tech people on the other end of the line/country crazy too....