Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Indian Customer Service

I was reading the feedback on a recent www.ABCNews.com story about Dell being sued by the NY attorney general for their less than stellar customer service. A lot of people are more than pissed that for the home computers you have to deal with some outsourced Indian service......and I'm not talking about Apache or Commanche Indians either.

Dayum...you'd think by reading that feedback that all those pissed off people were Texans by the way they are venting. But they aren't. So why don't American companies realize how badly that are enraging their own customers by makeing us deal with thick, heavy Indian accents? We have enough trouble just understanding one another on either side of the Mason Dixon line so how the hell can we understand someone in Bombay/Mumbai?

My only experience with that was when I had moved 3 years ago and I had called SBC about my DSL service. I somehow got bebopped over to India where this male yahoo was trying to tell me to reinstall my operating system. When I commented that the operating system had nothing to do with the issue, this guy was adamant..."You MUST reinstall the opreating system in order for your connection to work."

The hell I do.

So my gentile, Southern girl reply was: "Look Steve - and we all know your name is NOT Steve - my operating system has jack to do with this situation. So just because I am a girl and this is about technology do not assume that I don't know anything. The ONLY variable that changed was the DSL phone line the computer is attached to and the ONLY thing reinstalling my operating system will do is waste my time and give you a chance to get off work before I call in again."

He went on to jabber about something tech related - I guess to give his flaccid ego a boost - and I hung up the phone. I called SBC back and told them that I would only speak to someone currently in the United States of America and if I got transfered back over to India, within 24 hours their CEO would have a very detailed letter overnighted to him.

So what was the issue?

SBC's work order hadn't made it all the way through the system. Some yahoo along the way dropped the ball and didn't process one of the features.

Yes...that's right, there was no issue whatsoever with my operating system or anything else on my computer.

So just because someone says they are "tech support"....don't just blindly believe everything they tell you to do unless you want to find yourself taking a very big step off a very tall bridge.


.