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The View From the Ground At an Indian Call Center
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.
I saw this show... it was called Outsourced.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
The big problem with outsourced tech support tends to be that regardless of where it is situated they tend to get paid based on the number of calls they handle (at least for consumer services, for business products/services they tend to use better metrics). So they have no incentive in letting their employees fix problems (even if they can), just get customers off the line as quickly as possible.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Link to the print version so you don't have to click through three pages with entire page ads in between.
When I stopped asking questions, Shail had one for me. "I have experienced some Americans—please don't mind—they don't like Indians. They act rude as soon as they come to know I am Indian. Why is this?" I stammered something about protectionism, but really I didn't know what to say.
Simply put, nobody likes communicating with people who are.. well... difficult to communicate with. It's bad enough trying to overcome a language barrier in general conversation. It's even worse when you're trying to communicate a technical problem or make a complicated request. I don't want to have to spell out my email 3x in phonetic alphabet. Sometimes I can't even tell if the person I'm talking to actually understands my problem because everything they say is scripted.
Plus -- as Louis CK has said -- I know the Indian on the line doesn't give a shit about me and my white people problems.
The slots at the call centers are limited and highly sought; the training is intense, and the infrastructure is poor.
You know you're disillusioned when that assessment sounds equal to or better than most job openings in the United States.
In what? Choosing a fake name?
Sorry, but every 'Kevin' from Bangalore I've encountered has been completely useless. Not that I fault the individual workers - I'm sure it's a situation much like we have here in the US, where these poor souls are limited by asinine corporate playbooks, and thus, provide no valuable service to customers.
At least you understand that it's not their location or nationality that makes them useless, it's that they aren't really tech support people - they are consumer relations people. 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. But it's not like a company can afford to let you talk to a product engineer when your $150 Blu Ray player stops working.
The thing that gets me is that companies will spend lots of money putting together troubleshooting scripts and a knowledgebase that the call center workers can use, but they don't make that same information available to the public through their website, which would likely keep me from having to call tech support in the first place.
P.S. Since no one posted the obligatory xkcd link yet, here's one:
http://xkcd.com/806/
My main frustration with the outsourcing "issue" isn't that I'm talking to someone from India. It's that I'm talking to someone from India that's pretending to be from America. It's really insulting to our intelligence and I'm not sure what they gain from it at this point. Now it's well known that there's a ton of outsourcing, so why do companies bother trying to hide it anymore?
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...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I deal with Indians in two different capacities. One is my professional environment where I communicate with outsourced teams and the other is my personal environment where I contact customer support on various services and products.
I never give them hell, because I realize that they are just trying to make a living, but the communication and cultural barriers are too wide for me. Some of our technical partners utilize Indian software developers and I have been talking to Indians for over a decade and to this day I still have trouble with their accents. Email is a little better, but either cultural differences or something else causes conversations to be circular in nature. I don't think they are intentionally dishonest, but they have an aversion to saying "no" and end up being vague and confusing.
Also, either the companies who hire the call centers or the call center management themselves need to stop having call center reps address themselves with American names. I am not thoroughly educated in Indian customs, but I doubt there really are that many people in India named Bob, Joe, Rick, Ann, Susan, and Jennifer. They aren't fooling anybody and it is insulting one's intelligence.
I am sure working in an Indian call center is hell, and I respect them for making a living, but I honestly wish I didn't have to deal with them.
They have an aversion to saying "no" and end up being vague and confusing.
If you ever get a chance to go to India you're going to hate the head weave. It's half way between "Yes" and "No" but also means maybe, sometimes, all the time, and I don't know.
Its not because they are trying to fool you into thinking you are talking with an American. The issue is lots of those names are really really hard to pronounce for native English speakers who have no experience with Hindi.
I have worked very close with lots of India developers, the ones who actually come here tend to American-ize their names rather than pick a new one like John. Punjababriu becomes Prabu for instance. The later I can say correctly the former it took him helping me many times to learn to say correctly. You know I felt really bad about it too. Nobody likes it when you get their name wrong. Most of us don't want to go around hurting the feelings of or insulting others; or suspecting that we might be. In this case he knew it was not a respect thing and that I was trying really hard to learn to correctly say his name, but still.
Really these call center folks are doing you a kindness by sparing you the embarrassment of having to try and repeat a name that is going to be hard for your say.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
In what? Choosing a fake name? Sorry, but every 'Kevin' from Bangalore I've encountered has been completely useless.
Actually, one of the things that some Indian call center workers have been starting to revolt against is choosing American-sounding fake names for themselves. The workers of the opinion "My name is Rakesh, and I shouldn't be ashamed of that fact. Plus, they'll know I'm from India the moment I open my mouth, why try to hide it?" And management has occasionally gone along with that.
Tech support, outsourced or not, done on the cheap, will get shoddy results. Tech support will get done on the cheap (or not at all) because very few people buy tech products based on the quality of its tech support. They might say they do, but if a business purchaser has the choice between a $10,000 product with great tech support and a $9,000 product with shoddy tech support, they'll end up choosing the $9,000 product almost every time. Even if the guy responsible for the purchase decision thinks the tech support is worth it, convincing his boss to spend $1000 for tech support they may or may not need is difficult at best.
I am officially gone from
Not exactly Paul Hogan. Does explain some things about Mel Gibson, though.
I heard from an old-timer at Dell that some reps used to do tech support for two calls at once. Maybe someone will bring that back during high volume.
Indians can program to specifications, even if the specification is wrong and requires a Rube Goldberg device for compliance to corporate policy.
Tell me about it. I hate calling tech support and getting people in Alabama.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I bought a piece of equipment for $1,499 plus tax.
I could give fuck-all what the company that sold it to me pays their call-center employees. I want it to work. If that cuts into some fat plutocrat's viagra money, then fuck him for selling me something that can break.
I don't think there is a need for that.
Salaries are going up, eventually, they will reach true market value. You and I may suffer out in the west, however by the time next generation comes along, 5$/hr will seem more palatable to Americans at the same time as Indians would have moved to $5/hr. There would be a balance at some point. Already happening on the IT industry side, Avg. Indian Developer is a lot more costly than he was 10 years ago, and the costs are rising.
Beauty of free trade.
^^^ This. I've seen people get fired for even attempting to use critical thinking skills, because when the numbers and the procedures are the only thing that matter, critical thinking is a liability, both in the legal sense and the simple fact that it begins to break all of the nifty quality control metrics.
That drove me nuts until somebody told me what it means. The "bobble head" means "I hear you." It's only an acknowledgement that they've heard what you've said and nothing more.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, what does this say about renewable power?
Call Center jobs in the United States are considered very low end jobs with a high turn over, because most Americans even in this economic situation can get better jobs. Hence why they go to India or other countries, mostly because it is cheaper, but also because it is considered a good job if you can take it there so you get a better work from there.
The problem isn't that jobs are being outsourced, or even the Visas. It is that The United States lately has seemed to lag in Creating new types of jobs.
20/30 years ago Computer Jobs were big bucks you can get a good paying job as a Computer Operator, and Data Entry. Today such skills are basic for all new employees. Today Computers while advancing are not state of the art, the industry as matured and best practices have been made.
But the world and America hasn't done much lately to create new industries. We see some cool stuff in Nano-technology and Bio-Engineering, and in other areas but not enough for a good market to come out with people with new skills to come in and people can venture in without experience because no one has experience in that field.
America past success was creating new industry capitalizing on it until it matured, then pass it off to the rest of the world while it goes onto the next big thing.
But Nano-Tech and Bio-Engineering has brought up a lot of resistant people from Religious Zealots, to Hyper-Liberal Envionuts (Who think they are liberal, just because they don't like the Religious Zealots, or confuse being a democrat with being liberal) who are fighting tooth and nail against the next big thing from taking place.
As the TFA stated "10% of Americans are Wicked Smart" we need to start using our brain power more on solving the problem then using it to go against some political party (both sides) who is catering to get the other 90% vote. Don't worry about outsourcing jobs, if you are then you have already been doomed as you see a world were we cannot create the next new thing. And if we cannot create the next new thing then outsourced jobs is the least of our concern.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS. > 500.00 USD ( '80;s vintage dollars ) for a word processor, not an office suite but just word processing software.
Outrageous huh?
Perhaps, but you got a 1-800 number AND when you called it, you got an engineer ( more then likely a programmer on call center rotation ) that really knew the product inside and out and would talk to you for as long as it took to solve the problem and that could be formatting, printing, or their extremely powerful scripting language.
Just try calling Microsoft for help with Office, go ahead I will watch and laugh.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
When I stopped asking questions, Shail had one for me. "I have experienced some Americans—please don't mind—they don't like Indians. They act rude as soon as they come to know I am Indian. Why is this?" I stammered something about protectionism, but really I didn't know what to say.
Simply put, nobody likes communicating with people who are.. well... difficult to communicate with.
This doesn't explain it.
American consumers are watching companies abandon customer service and outsourcing these functions to overseas companies that employ call-takers that have no knowledge of the products they support, no ability to do any real troubleshooting, and no authority to give any help at all outside the script on their desk.
India isn't the cause of the problem; it's the symptom. When we call and talk to someone in India, we're not upset at India, we're upset at the company we're trying to do business with, which has let us down. Talking to someone in India is simply the indication that the company we're working with doesn't care about us as customers.
This is still the case, our local call center where my girlfriend is a quality specialist (yes they have them, they are just not listened too for the most part), they have only one contract for the whole building, and they are paid by buy how many calls they take, so its not just outsourced call center jobs. In my experience in working there for a very short time it is the number one complaint of the people working there, more then pay or schedule's or hours, because most people (probably 75%) genuinely want to help people but they are restrained by 2 minute call handle times, try giving good service to someone in two minutes after they have been on hold for 10-30 minutes only happens about 5% of the time at best, the rest get bullshitted, or transferred to some number then gets them right back where they started. Sure they have intensives for good reviews of the service they gave, but that is to get meager bonuses, (which they wont get anyway if the have a high handle time) their hourly rate and their performance reviews are entirely based on handle time.
I am sure I will get moded down for this, but "whateva"... (yes I am American)
I am so tired of American IT workers bitching about Indian tech support. First off... It seems that most of the time, the American IT guy bitching about the support he is getting actually has no clue WTF he is talking about in the first place. Second... Why don't you shut your American-I-am-always-right mouth for one second and actually LISTEN. If you are too stupid to realize that your speaking with a person whose first language is not English and you need to slow down, then you're probably fall into my first point.
"These" people that you are speaking with are not trained monkeys. I believe in TFA most of the people he spoke with were top of their class or had higher education.
This article and many other western publication paint the picture that BPOs are the only game in town for young Indians. Not true. Engineers are in very high demand, especially Civil, Mining and Mechanical engineers. College graduates with degrees in commerce or liberal arts also do well depending on the first job they take up. Jobs that service the local market are tougher but have an actual career path. But you won't get to work in a nice air-conditioned office, won't have a car to pick and drop you back and initial pay will be lower than a call center job. Several of my friends who started working for local banks and selling financial products to Indians started off with low pays and jobs that require a lot of enterprise and leg-work. Ten years later, most of them make more money that I do in silicon valley with a respectable 6 figure salary. People (kids really), who end up in BPO jobs get attracted by the initial high salary, party like culture on premises (free food, chicks, parties thrown to retain employees). So can't really blame capitalism for this mess. These young people can chose - start with a good pay and good work environment but boring job and no career path OR start low, work hard but have a viable career ten years down the line.
Tell me about it. I hate calling tech support and getting people in Alabama.
Wait, there are call centers in Alabama? I thought you needed phones for those.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The de-culturation in the article is nothing new. My great-grandfather Jarsoslav changed his name to "Jerry" when he moved to the US from Bohemia in 1912.
I used to buy only Dell computers, and was influential in getting three companies to switch all Dell, from 1991 until about 2002 (two of which are now publicly traded, and presumably still using Dell). The kind of demo I could do for the higher level decision makers was fun. Got a stupid Microsoft PowerPoint question? Ever try to get it answered from Microsoft? Yeah... right. I could call Dell support about any stupid Windows question, and I'd get a very knowledgeable guy on the other end who would take more time on my stupid question than was warranted, and end with "You know technically, we don't support Microsoft software, but the answer is ..." It as awesome. As for hardware issues, one call and a guy who could fix the problem was at my door within hours. Sometime shortly after the tech bubble burst, when suddenly out-sourcing was all the rage, the people answering my support calls changed. I don't mind that they're Indian. What I mind is that they refused to do support. I had a critical tape out and was under pressure and needed the f**king machine up and running, and some SOB from Dell simply refused to send anyone to help. The damage caused to our little company buy an insanely stupid Dell refusal to honor their support contract... well, I'm still not over it. I had to go to Best Buy and buy their highest end machine that day, and it had neither the memory or CPU power we needed. Ever do LVS/DRC on a compaq presario mini-tower?
So, I set company policy to never again buy a support contract from Dell, and instead make sure we had a spare model of any Dell computer we used lying around if needed. We saved a ton of money, and never had to deal with those Dell support goons again. I still kept buying Dell computers, though. They remain the best deal in the USA, IMO, for cheap reliable hardware. Unfortunately for Dell, when my company was bought, the new owners had a different reaction to their own Dell support nightmare: switch the entire company to HP, with full support contracts. We now spend a ton more on hardware and support, but HP support rocks. Like the poster above, I don't blame the Indian call center employees. They weren't in the same class as Dell's old support, but clearly the management chain at Dell was mainly at fault.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Let me share my experience working in an American call center.
no authority to give any help at all outside the script on their desk
DING DING DING! Give the man a cigar!.
Quite often the people setting up accounts with us are outsourcing because the "girl who handles that" or "the lady at the front desk" is taking on additional responsibilities.
When they give us incomplete information or information that indicated that they really have no idea what kinds of procedures the "lady at the front desk" does to handle calls and schedule service (for example), they often given snippy answers like "you'll never get a call like that."
If we do get extra information, we're lucky to know that Bob's HVAC does refrigeration also. We're also lucky to get maybe a quarter of their staff list, so when someone calls up expecting to be transferred to Frank (because that's what the girl at the front desk always did), we don't even know Frank works there.
So all you can do is say, "I can take your name and number and let them know in the morning :)" and just hope your caller isn't going to be one of the really difficult ones.
If the caller is important enough and pissed off enough, then we'll get a snippy email that says, "I have concerns that you don't know how to answer calls. You need to always be doing xyz. And I'm not going to pay for that 20 minute call where the agent politely took toe-curling, foul-mouthed abuse and sexual harassment with a smile in her voice the whole time, either." Usually then one can cross-reference that with the other email where you proactively asked how to handle xyz and got "you'll never get calls like that" as the response.
The problem is nearly always (but not every time) the client. Don't even get me started about when we spend an hour reaching the only person we're allowed to reach only to finally get ahold of them, and either a.) we're never supposed to call them (along with various insults, etc) or b.) they haven't worked for the client in 2 years.
After all, we're just the call center. It's not like we answer their phones 128 hours out of the week.
(That being said, ask yourself who would want to be a call center agent and take abuse 8 hours a day without any way to even answer the caller's most simple questions and why can't they get a fast food job where they're at least doing something tangible, and you get the other half of the picture.)
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Assuming it doesn't get overused, that actually sounds like a really useful communication tool. A lot of stress would be averted if you knew someone wasn't ignoring you, but rather had never actually heard you (or understood you).
I worked at a call center for a while and was told by my supervisor that my call times were too high and I needed to hose-and-close more people. (Translation: Lie to them and get them to do something they can't possibly stay on the phone for.) "Hose-and-close" was his words, BTW.
This was printer support for HP. The contractor (EDS) was paid per call, so hose-and-close was a profit generator, and at 23 minutes per call instead of the maximum 20, I wasn't generating enough profit.
On the other hand, the retard I sat next to once had a guy go out and buy a new printer cable. Her diagnostics? She had him go to DOS and type something that couldn't possibly print anything. The printer could've been off, had error lights, or been on fire and she would not have known. When it didn't print she told him it was the cable. Only reason I found out about it was because he called back and got me - not because the cable failed but because she'd LEFT HIM AT THE DOS PROMPT. He didn't know what to do to get back into Windows (and this is Windows 9x where you're outside Windows entirely, often even a reboot won't get you back), she'd just dropped the call after telling him to buy the cable.
After the call I felt so sick about helping her con some nice old guy that I logged off and came unglued, calling her down in front of the entire department. She moved to another seat, which solved another problem I had with her - she stank of... something, like a mix of cheap perfume and a gas station. EDS had alternately refused to or insisted they somehow had enforced their no-scent policy.
"Helping her con some nice old guy" you ask? Yes. All I did was get him back to Windows because I couldn't tell him the truth. It was against policy to EVER contradict another agent. Understand, if an agent said to a customer "You're name's Goldstein? Damn it, Hitler didn't do a good enough job cleaning you fuckers up." and had proof, my only response could be "I'm sorry, but you must have misheard him." Could have a recording of it and play it back for me and all I could do was insist they weren't hearing it right. The customer's always wrong, and deaf to boot.
Left after I got cancer and I was told that if I kept "skipping training classes" (going to see my oncologist) I'd be fired. So I quit. After the layers of scum I'd built up working there I was an emotional wreck, and I just couldn't handle being told I should quit or die on the phone. I did manage to hit their dental insurance for over $1000 of work just days before I quit, though. A small recompense, I think.
Would not wish that shit on my worst enemy, and I work with several other people who feel the same way. (I fix PCs for a living and a lot of us got our start in call centers.)
(Posting AC for obvious reasons!)
On the other hand, in India we know that its rote-learning, not route learning :)
There's a reason call centers tend to be established in small college towns and similar places, lots of young people with a decent education but not a lot of jobs available. That's not to say there are no jobs, just that someone straight out of college can't exactly pick and choose, so it's easy for people to think "Oh, I'll just do tech support/customer service for a while until I find a real job..." and then end up working there for two or three years before they're so broken psychologically that they just have to quit (or get fired for using their brain or education to actual do their job).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
"10% of Americans are Wicked Smart"
The problem is that even if only 5% of Indians and Chinese are "wicked smart", that's still 125 million people...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
When that happens that person is under-employed and under-achieving by miles and miles :)
--
Ignorant bosses are ignorant
If they're that fucking over-qualified why don't they go andd get a proper job instead then?
Bwah bwah brain the size of a planet and I'm opening doors for people bwah bwah.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it