A few years ago there was a craze for British and American companies to provide its customer service from Indian call centres. A plethora of centres opened to employ tens of thousands of people. It seems the novelty is over and the companies are rapidly moving their customer service back. So why have India’s call centres not worked for UK and American companies?
In an article in BBC News claimed that customer dissatisfaction with the Indian accent has been the main reason for its failure and apparently, people do not like accented speech. This surely cannot be true as phoning up call centres in Newcastle can be equally hard to understand. However, it is a reason given by many companies.
For me, the accents weren’t the problem, it was the length of time it took to explain the issue or problem. Making phone calls in your lunch hour just didn’t work. Calls would become frustrating because of a lack of understanding of the language and ultimately, customer service was really poor.
After two hours of getting nowhere on the phone to repair our boiler, a huge bill to call out an emergency plumber despite our insurance and the headache of claiming the money back, we decided that we would boycott any company using overseas call centres. Having made this choice, we have found customer service departments locally to be more helpful, resourceful and effective.
Maybe now they have brought the call centres back, they might even consider having a human being answering the phone rather than an automated system which is equally infuriating!
Bunty
