Posted on 09/29/2005 6:19:46 AM PDT by Cagey
Sept. 28, 2005 — As Hurricane Rita roared toward them, more than 300 people called the local emergency number broadcast all around Nacogdoches County in east Texas. What they didn't know was that the operators on the other end of the phone were 7,000 miles away in India.
With power down and limited means of communication, Nacogdoches County Judge Sue Kennedy, who acts as the emergency coordinator, decided to set up a phone bank to help people out. She called a local firm that runs call centers and asked if they could help the community. Effective Teleservices, based in Nacogdoches, had a power generator big enough to keep a phone bank running but management didn't want to put employees in harm's way by making them come to work.
Kennedy didn't hesitate.
"In disasters we respond more quickly with the help of our local businesses and move much faster than by waiting for federal or state aid," she said.
She and her staff polished off a script with vital information regarding the location of ad-hoc shelters and what people needed when they left home.
"We wanted to make sure they [the operators] kind of understood and could give specific answers to questions," Kennedy said.
Who You Gonna' Call?
Across the globe, Jim Iyoob, the director of operations at the Indian call center site, gathered 15 of his customer representatives and trained them to work the emergency hotline. Iyoob had lived and worked three years in the Nacogdoches area so he was able to give additional information to his staff before Kennedy's people called to see if the "local" hotline worked.
The operators passed the test and within hours the switchboard was lighting up in sun-drenched Gandhinagar – a world away from hurricane-battered East Texas. The Indian operators offered words of encouragement to concerned Nacogdoches callers, and there were no reports of problems during the operation, Kennedy said.
Well, then you would need a working communications room, fully operational in an area outside of the zone affected by the hurricane, and you'd need to gather evacuees and teach them how to use the equipment in a very short time. This was a fully-operational, staffed call center out of harm's way, already connected to a local business, ready to operate at a moment's notice. Seems reasonable to me... or am I missing something?
The bag is made in China. The sand is 100% all American.
Well, at least you had his name, so you could report your bad experience to the company using the call center. :-)
My experiences with call centers (primarily for computer problems) have been okay. Not thrilled with the service for the most part, but not bad. It would be wonderful if we could staff call centers here with intelligent, well-spoken helpful Americans -- but most of them wouldn't want the job unless it paid big bucks.
I actually answered phones for a mobile vet service when my oldest children were babies. The pay wasn't great, but I could do it from home with current phone technology. Fortunately, most people didn't mind the screaming baby in the background, and I was only taking messages, not giving important information or advice. Still, it might be an idea for some homebound people.... Does anyone know if that's been tried?
"Why couldn't the call centers be staffed with
American evacuees who needed jobs?"
Have you ever been in a call center? They are not built in a day. Also, you would have to deal with getting phone lines into the center, as well as other infrastructure.
I hope that ABC News is not implying that the distance of the phone call mattered.
Ping
Hey! I represent that post! ;)
Can we outsource Congress?
Gotta love it.
Mumbai is the southern most part of a peninsula on the west coast of India, not much that's offshore and north of there...
Now if we could send the hurricanes there, too...
Hurricane calls outsourced....
This seems just sad to me.
Good one!
I had to share.
hahahaha!You're sooo cool, blazing AZ
I'm not a big fan of it too. But as long as we don't outsource all manufacturing, we should be fine. We must never forget how to build stuff.
I had seen that pic without the mastercard parody ad words. The caption just said something to the effect of "leave it to the Aggies to hang plywood on the wrong side of the windows in preparation for hurricane rita".
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