"Thank you, call again."
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.
"Thank you, call again."
That's awesome.
Yeah. Evidently we don't know how to make sandbags anymore. Of course, we could always use lawyers instead since we do know how to make lots of them.
OK call me crazy but
Why couldn't the call centers be staffed with
American evacuees who needed jobs?
Yeah, only drawback is that lawyers float, at first.
"Okay, please to calm down Mr. Smith. Did you close all your windows and go to your power station and turn off the big switch as I told you? Very good. Now go back to the power station and turn the switch back on again..."
Besides the time factor because the evacuees will make more off of federal aid then they would working.
They're just making the sandbags Americans don't want to fill anymore.
Not trained to answer the phone?
Is there anything left which is not outsourced?
Can't you and Bob pick on someone else ... used car salesmen, roofers, infomercial personalities, customer non-service employees? There must be some other group at which you can hurl your broad generalizations!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1489908/posts
My lawyer's one of the good guys.
Besides, I've read there are noise ordinances all around the levies -- lawyers would not be a good choice.
This is a joke...right?
I highly doubt the authenticity of this article. I havent yet head of any such thing being reported from the Indian news media.
I think this is just another malicious tripe to bait Indians over the issue of outsourcing.
And most people think their own farts don't smell as bad as everyone else's.
Looks real on the ABC news site. But this was left out... comes before "Kennedy didn't hesitate."
"So the operating officer, Matthew Rocco, offered what he had proposed to his other clients: He could redirect calls to the company's offshore site in India, in a city north of Mumbai."
Sounds like a reasonable plan to me, and it appears to have worked.
Ah, well, yes. Now we are operating at the eighth grade level of humor.
Shouldn't you be in school right now?
You're crazy (just kidding).
Excellent point.
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