Posted on 01/15/2006 7:44:31 AM PST by SmithL
Mike McPhate wrote a story for Newsday on Wednesday that made me wince, because it revealed how at least a fraction of the hostility that America receives from the rest of the world may be justified.
The reporter, in New Delhi, discussed the picture of bigoted Americans that forms for Indians who answer the phone at a call center in Noida or Hyderabad.
The story opens with an anecdote from a 22-year-old woman named Debalina Das, who worked on a tech line for four months before quitting.
One American caller told her: "You Indian slut, in some (expletive) Third World country, roaming about naked without food and clothes — what do you know about computers? Have you ever seen one?"
In what may not come as a complete surprise to you, Ms. Das has learned to dislike Americans. Occasionally there are decent callers, "but then others remind me that all they believe in is cursing and they don't have respect for others."
Every day there are 40 million calls between Indian agents and American customers, and about 5 percent involve bigotry, says Vinod Shetty, a lawyer in Bombay who has formed a collective for call center workers. The result is a "searing anger" among employees.
I winced because I myself was annoyed the first couple of times that I discovered that my helper was in India. Both times I was working on a problem with my Compuserve software, an experience plenty frustrating all by itself.
The first time, a couple of years ago, I decided something was peculiar because the helper had a heavy accent and the phone connection didn't seem clear. "Where are you?" I asked suspiciously. "India," he said. I hung up. I thought I was caught in a scam to run up my phone bill. Phishers had hacked into the Compuserve system.
The second time, I had accepted that the call center was real, and so I made a crotchety effort to get my problem fixed. The helper talked me through the routine — unplug your computer, plug it back in, reboot, wave a dead chicken around the monitor, yada, yada, yada.
As usual, the routine didn't work, and so the helper escalated the call. He put me on a waiting list to receive a return call from a technician. "Yeah, whatever," I said wearily, expecting never to hear back from Compuserve again.
Then, as I was about to go, the helper inquired if he could ask me a few questions. Was I satisfied with the quality of service I had received from him? "No," I grumped.
"But I don't understand," said the man, genuinely hurt. "I followed the procedures and referred you to a technician." I was guilted.
The problem, of course, is not the helpers. As the Newsday report says, they are simply young, skilled Indians who want to move into their nation's middle class. They make about $200 a month, a lot in India.
They admire America. Or, at least, they used to. Now I wish I could go back and apologize to the men who helped me. It's not your fault, I would say. The real culprit is American businessmen who have outsourced the jobs. Computer problems are unpleasant enough in the first place. Why must they be made worse by language comprehension problems?
We are already in one mysterious, unfamiliar land, the land of suffixes such as .pfc and .lck. Now we have to go to another mysterious, unfamiliar land?
Where does it end?
I've been with Compuserve since 1993. Part of the illusion of the help line back then was that the people on the other end were in the same country. If all else failed, you knew they could get in their car and drive to your house from Columbus, Ohio. They'd fix you up right quick.
But now, how is someone from Hyderabad going to be able to drive to my house? It would take at least a week.
That's why I'm not happy when I reach India. I'd like to think it has nothing to do with race. I'd like to think I'd feel the same way if my call reached a faraway Western nation like New Zealand. You can't understand someone from Auckland any better than you can understand someone from Noida, right?
Sadly, for some of us, it probably does have something to do with race. According to the Newsday report, Indian television is now carrying a sitcom called "The Call Center." One episode re-creates a recent true exchange that has become notorious. On a Philadelphia radio show, a man named Troi Terrain called India, pretending to order hair beads, and then turned vicious:
"Listen to me, you dirty rat-eater," he said. " ... I'm calling about my American 6-year-old white girl. How dare you outsource my call?"
Still, I believe few Americans are bigots. The problems here are computer frustration, language difficulty, economic anxiety and people who feel abandoned and disrespected because their help call rings in a foreign nation thousands of miles away.
To the people of India: I apologize for the morons among us.
To the businessmen who have moved these jobs overseas: When your time comes, you will go to a special place. The phone will say: "For ice water, please press 7. Your estimated waiting time is 10 billion years."
Michael Bowers is a paginator for The Star. His column appears every other Sunday. Send email to mbowers@starnewspapers.com.
But the computer still isn't working correctly.
Besides, the Indians THINK they speak SUCH good English....but their pronunciation is OFTEN very difficult to get around. Their writing is worse. They also invent words, thinking it's so wonderful. It's stupid.
You DID bush a button, didn't you? Lol.
Callers do have the right to request a contact number to speak to someone in the US. Callers do NOT have the right to be rude. I have received excellent service from outside the US, but I may be in the minority.
If the roles were reversed here, I am certain that Indian customers having to call the US for technical assistance would be just as irate and nasty under the circumstances.
I think part of it too is the outsourcing. The jobs that have gone over there are American jobs. While, it turned out that the job I lost to India was not so good (worse than I what I have now), it still brings back bad memories when I get transferred there. I try not to be a jerk and never asks how they know what they know about computers. They've been trained, but the language barriers make things hard.
If they don't like their job they can quit and bring these jobs back to the USA.
Micron PC call center is in Idaho.
One American caller told her: "You Indian slut, in some (expletive) Third World country, roaming about naked without food and clothes — what do you know about computers? Have you ever seen one?"
Ah, another satisfied DELL customer.
Seriously, no reason to talk like that, but I know the guy's frustration. It got to point where I just hung up and called back in hopes to get someone where English was at least their 2nd language.
This seems like a bit of a false lead.
People in foreign lands were hostile towards us way before the call center phenomenon started.
The communications gap is a shame, and I wonder if better training of the Indians would be helpful. Maybe they can figure out how to lose those accents. I do know that if I ran a call center, I'd try to find a country to put it in where you could at least understand the people.
I'm not going to make communication impossible just to save a few bucks, but the economics of a foreign call center are compelling. Maybe someone can go into a third-world country and run a special school for call center people that would start them from ground zero in teaching unaccented English.
D
I did call center work for a year. I was outsourced to an American company who did work for HP (back when HP was a good company, support-wise).
The work is brutal, stressful, and thankless. If you're a good tech then you're soon moving on, either because you've got a good job offer or because you see the other good techs leaving and you don't want to be the only good tech. The pay, while significantly better than what I was making prior to that job, was much lower than IT jobs (especially ones that didn't require lots of phone calls). Quite frankly, there didn't seem to be enough Americans to fill those jobs, even after the recruiting bonus hit $1000.
Now I'm on the other side of the line. I routinely call tech support, and I've become brutally honest on my evals of techs. IN fact, I've even "escalated" to their supervisors, or even the company's CEO, to sing the praise or condemn the failures.
Some notes that I pass along to customers:
1. Just because they're Indian doesn't mean that it's bad support. IN fact, SBC's new Indian call center is light years better than their former American facility.
1 1/2. If you pay for cheap techs, don't train them well, and have constant turnover, you're gonna have bad support. That goes for any country.
2. There is a huge culture gap between the USA and India. I try to bridge that gap by getting the Indian tech to teach me their "real" name ("Steve" and "Bridget" are not real Indian names). I then apologize for having trouble w/ their name. I try to be as polite as I can if I can't understand them.
3. The cheaper the product, the more chance you've got of using tech support, and the worse it's gonna be. If you buy a $60 inkjet printer then you're not gonna get happy techs living in LA who are printer gurus. It you buy a $300 Dell instead of a $1200 Dell you can guess where they cut costs.
In my experiences with Dell Tech Support, one appears to have two choices: someone who cannot speak English who knows what to do, and someone who can who does not.
You are correct. Most Indian people get impatient and lose their cool easily. Plus they have this condescending attitude.
Hmm. Lets see. Guru, juggernaut, pundit,bandana, bangle, chintz, cummerbund, dungaree, khaki, pajamas, kebab, bungalow, dinghy, polo... You're right, they do like to invent words!
I actually work with Indians and like them right well.
But this outfit knew nothing at all about DSL. They were obviously working off of flip charts. Their standard answer for everything was to have the user uninstall all internet related software and reinstall everything.
Fortunately RoadRunner™ cable internet was available.
On the one or two occasions I had to call RoadRunner™ tech support I actually got a very pleasant individual who knew EVERYTHING about the product they were supporting.
BTW. If you buy a Palm PDA, you will get the same bunch of idiots working off of flip charts. Their standard answer to any problem is "The problem is caused by third-party software. You will have do do a hard-reset. It will erase all your data."
Whatever one's motivations, inclinations; justifications et al. . .communicating disrespect to another is gross, rude behavior. . .and a behavior that more often than not. . .defines Liberals; though certainly not exclusively. . .
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