Those who remember customer service before companies started outsourcing, how do you feel about the current outsourced customer service when you call a company’s hotline?
Those who remember customer service before companies started outsourcing, how do you feel about the current outsourced customer service when you call a company’s hotline?
Comments
I’ll be honest, I don’t care where the call goes to, I just want to be able to understand the person I’m talking to.
Oh customer service calls are garbage. I have to wade through the shit stream of a call tree before I get to some heavily accented kid from Bangalore who can’t fix my problem or even understand the words coming out of my mouth? Yeah, I’d rather not.
What age group are you referring to? Calling tech support only to end up at some call center in India with someone you couldn’t understand was fodder for jokes 30 years ago.
It’s annoying, not effective, and I feel bad for these people often because of how they are trained. They basically have to follow a script and often can’t think critically or provide common sense depending on the situation or information i need.
Not their fault at all, they are just doing what they’re told, but it makes it really hard to get concrete answers/info unless you say the perfect thing to them.
there are still plenty of customer service call centers filled with people who know nothing and can’t help you here in the US too.
I try to avoid calling them as much as possible. After waiting on hold for an hour just to not be able to understand a word of what the person you’re trying to talk to is saying.
I was a voice behind a 1-800 number for years before we were outsourced. Our support was second to no one. I went to work for a customer and now I call the 1-800 number and while it is better than what was when outsourcing first happened, it isn’t the same level of support my team gave.
But if you go back to the 80s when everything was fixed and ordered through the phone, I’ve gotten into arguments with people as to whether Alaska was a state or not…so even the service of old wasn’t always great.
And to transfered, again, again, again. No understanding of first call closure.
The companies that have outsourced their customer service to make it cheap and shitty had shitty customer service before they outsourced too.
And the companies that used to have good customer service and outsourced still have good customer service. Unless they were bought up by some shitty megacorp that has shitty customer service, in which case shitty customer service is due to the change of ownership, not the outsourcing.
I don’t care who I talk to or where they are, what I hate is the million steps of automated messaging it takes to reach a human being.
Discover uses real Americans (at least for now). The customer service is unreal!!! Xfinity won’t let you talk to anyone, but if you finally get someone, they don’t understand you enough to get the issue. I’ll be leaving them soon.
I don’t give a shit where the person I’m talking to is, I just want them to be trained in actually solving the problem, not just repeating a stupid script over and over again and not using any critical thinking or problem-solving skills or even listening to what I’m saying.
If I can clearly understand them, then I don’t care, and there’s a certain novelty to talking to someone who isn’t a computer.
However, my hearing is on the muffled sides and IRL, I get a lot of the distinction between words both by what I hear and by looking at someone’s mouth. When I’m on the phone with someone with a thick accent, it is VERY difficult for me, and I feel like a provincial asshole going “what? What? What?” over and over.
I’m happy when I can talk to a real person and not go in circles with phone menu hell.
Even the call centers that are US based haven’t been really great. It’s more of what they are used for. Anything cable or insurance related is just bad in general.
Personally, I prefer to deal with a competent american who gets the job done.
Frankly idgaf who’s picking up the phone, I just want to talk to a person not a robot
Feels like 9/10 times, when I get to a real person they can fix my issue within 2 minutes. The robot fails to do what I need at least 4 or 5 times in 10
So long as the call quality is clear and the person speaks English well, it doesn’t really matter to me. It’s not like this is new, I was frustrated by overseas call centers 25 years ago.
When I was a DirecTV customer, I always felt that theirs was among the best because while I was likely speaking to someone in India, they spoke like they were from the UK. But when AT&T bought them out, it almost immediately went downhill in every way sadly.
The difference in support I’m getting today from even last year is baffling. Same apps, significantly worse support experience.
At this point I’m glad when I can at least talk to a human.
I’ll take a real human with a minor language barrier over an AI recording. I’m not gonna lie I kinda like that a lot of customer service lines are 24/7 now. I had to call McAfee at 11 pm central time the other day, spoke with a lady in India who was extremely polite and helpful, and solved my problem right then instead of having to wait until the next morning to call.
Don’t care where the person is from, the biggest issue is these people are reading from a script and usually aren’t empowered to do the action I need them to do.
I worked customer service at a mail order catalog company based in the Midwest that has call centers in three different states…no outsourcing. I was one of the few reps who had made it in during a bad snow storm so I had a morning full of very unhappy people who’d been waiting on the line for quite awhile. I got one guy who was just furious at the wait and going off…so I let him vent for awhile before explaining that due to snow storm in the midwest, we had many reps who could not make it into the center that morning. There was silence for a long moment before he said… “Snow storm? Midwest? Where are you located at?” I told him where I was located at and he finally laughed and said that we had a customer in him as long as we were still employing locals for our call centers.
I get so frustrated when the connection is bad and I can’t understand a word of it. Ask my address,I say it then get told it’s wrong so I repeat it and get told I said it wrong the first time and then get lectured about it. I’m good off that.
Bring back customer service agents that we can understand that know our country and our values. It’s different I’m so sick of the fake names they say that they stumble through. James and next blink they’re Jake. It’s strange.
I don’t care where the agent is. I just want the phone answered immediately without an IVR when I call.
Weirdly, as much hate as American banks rightly get, Chase and American Express do pretty well here.
I don’t care where they are as long as we mutually understand each other. My bigger issue is trying to use robots and AI to handle calls.
It’s usually fine, if a little rote. Some companies are so scripted that it’s ridiculous. When I moved into my house, there was no physical internet line from the pole to the house because the house had been vacant for a very long time. Called Xfinity to order a line run, and this guy just couldn’t deviate from the script. “Ok let’s start by turning your modem on so I can see you on the system”. “It won’t work, there isn’t an internet cable.” “In order to see what your problem is, I will need you to turn on your modem” ad nauseum. That was a top 5 stupid interaction for me.
Of the few companies that still uses in-house customer service people, Chewy is the absolute best. They’re 24 hours, and a live person in the US answers on the second ring. No phone tree, it’s incredible. Their people are super helpful, too. I’ve never had less than a stellar experience with them.
It genuinely depends on who I’m dealing with. Certain companies have better outsourced help then others. Amazon isn’t terrible but varies. My cell company has kinda went down a little bit but overall still useful
I expect it. Pretty much everyone outsources. The companies that don’t outsource are the exception to the rule and few and far between.
I like it because it creates a lot of opportunity and employment for people whose skills don’t go much further than being able to speak coherently.
Outsourcing happens within the US. Come to Nebraska and I will show you all our ridiculous call centers.
There is a large concentration of call centers in Omaha partly due to the generic accent and that we were the usual place 800 numbers went to because at one time Bell said you could not use a 800 number for both in state and out of state calls. You used to see ads that said “Available everywhere except in Nebraska.” This was also partly because we had a huge amount of telephone lines running through the state for the Strategic Air Command when phones lines were limited.
I worked for years doing electronics repairs for film and stage lighting equipment, and I definitely witnessed this decline in real time. Particularly when, as in a lot of industries, the big companies started to buy up the smaller ones. 20+ years ago, it was a lot more common to call up a tech-related company and speak to someone who had been dealing with a certain piece of equipment for years—and sometimes, if the company was small enough, you would get the person who actually designed the thing. Then they would get acquired by some much larger company, and inevitably the next time you called or emailed, you would be directed to a generic representative who was obviously working off a script, and who may or may not have any idea what you were actually talking about. In some cases they unofficially dropped customer service completely, since a lot of companies would much prefer to sell you something new instead of spending time supporting a thing they already made their money off of. It’s an incredibly shortsighted attitude, and one that I feel will threaten our infrastructure long-term.
“Hey I tried turning this off and it still doesn’t work.”
“Hiyessaaryanedtaflopswitchupandtryitsaarihopedeshelped”
It also sucked then. Don’t be sugary nostalgic.
Honestly I feel it’s kinda close to what it is now. Foreign, usually Indian, customer service used to be really bad. But it feels like in recent years it’s gotten better. I imagine these huge corporations that use it had heard the complaints over the years and made adjustments.
I used to work for a customer service center. I’d still get people screaming about me needing to speak English. Honestly I just really want someone who can understand me and vice versa. I’m tired of the fucking robots though.
It almost always is shitty.
I like that most of the time I can resolve issues online without having to make a phone call at all.
What’s crazy is so many companies it’s roulette. I’ll call at one point and it’ll be Cebu Steve – you can’t understand him, he can’t understand you. Nothing is an absolute. I had a medical device problem and everything was a maybe, I’d ask the same question one time and get a yes, then ask again to verify and it’d be a no. I hang up, I call back and get Fran from Wilmington. Understood the problem, empathized, we chatted about Duke losing, and problem solved in less than 15 minutes. Easy as pie
I don’t think I’ve ever needed to call a hotline. Occasionally I chat with someone online, but that’s it. I rarely need customer service for anything
One of my company’s biggest selling points is that if you are a client and you call us it isn’t a phone tree or call center. You have an agent who will answer and take your call directly.
If they are in a meeting or with a client the call may get bounced to the corporate office but they send you directly to the local office and the ladies at the front desk take care of you, but 90% of the time you talk directly with your specific agent.
One of many reasons I’m glad to be eligible for USAA insurance…
It’s rough. The offshoring and/outsourcing of customer service was starting around the time that I was in early adulthood, but I do remember the before times, as it were.
With how scripted the service calls are, I sometimes feel like I’m talking to a poorly-programmed AI. And, that is made worse when it is an offshore call center, both because of trying to parse thick accents and because of just different speech patterns. I’m sure the employees are doing the best they can, but it shouldn’t be a worse text experience talking to a human than it is talking to a chatbot. And it’s not like the chatbots are good.