View Full Version : In praise of Indian Call Centres
Markly Darkly
20-11-2007, 12:59
Now here's a strange posting.
It appears from the many postings I read here that anyone who gets through to the Indian call centres automatically gives up hope and assumes that there problems will not be solved.
My experience is different. After having had several problems with my account merger which resulted in my Broadband account being shut down and then revitalised, I had to call the Technical Helpline, as my log-in still wasn't working. I made two calls and both the people I spoke to were extremely helpful, knowledgable and very polite. They apologised when I said I couldn't hear them very well and the calls went well. They refunded my call charges and did exactly what they said they would do. I even got an e-mail today to my alternative e-mail address, as promised, to confirm what had happened.
Yes, I'm sure that as with all call centres, UK and India, there are good and bad experiences, and I was probably fortunate to get 'good' both times, but praise where praise is due, and I thought it would make a nice change to see a positive opinion of something that probably gets a disproportionate amount of criticism.
handyman
20-11-2007, 13:51
It is funny you should post this right as I was on the phone to Sky's Indian call centre who took my details put me on hold for 4 mins tried to transfer me then hung up.
Got back on and got the Irish call centre all sorted now.
Managed to get the Indian centre 4 times and never got any satisfaction.
xspeedyx
20-11-2007, 14:12
I only had a one bad experience with indian call centre when I had slow speeds and he got me to reboot 5 times and then ask if I could get online 20 minutes later I said he had sorted it and he said he would refunded me and didnt o well the other times which are rare went really well so 1 bad expericnce out of i would say 3 aint bad
"I read here that anyone who gets through to the Indian call centres automatically gives up hope "
Thats my take on it, out of about 10 calls, 2 gave up when i mentioned Vista, [probably not trained on it then] 2 sent out engineers, and the other calls were to find out why my speed dropped at certain times, before we all new about the 4pm on "curfew", and over subscription.
But in most cases i would never ring them unless no other option. :(
Glad your sorted anyway.
rockabillybass
20-11-2007, 16:50
Since last Thursday I've had major problems with my Broadband, TV and Phone.
The TV sorted itself out and is now working OK. I phoned the phone helpline from work and was routed to India. My call was handled politely and professionally by an Indian woman who ran a few tests and then booked me an engineer at a time that was convenient to me. No problem at all - she was excellent.
Next I phoned the broadband helpline. I had to do this from a mobile, as my landline was not working but I knew they would want me to be at my computer. Again I was routed to India. The guy that took my call was helpful. I knew he was following his scripts but as my cable light was not working on my cable modem most of the time, I was pretty certain that the problem was with VM. He agreed and didn't bother with the "you've got spyware" routine.
Just before I got to the point of agreeing a time slot for the engineer, my credit ran out on my mobile. I had given him my mobile number as an alternative point of contact. He phoned me straight back and we continued to book the engineer. Top marks for that. He was polite and helpful.
All in all, I was expecting a call centre nightmare but didn't get one. I'm happy with the service I got. I also got the cost of the call refunded at 25p per minute plus 10p connection charge as it was VM's fault.
I think the Virgin Customer Service is pretty much non-functional. If the problem can't be solved by switching it off and on again then give up on 150 151.
If you visit www.saynoto0870.co.uk and search for "Virgin Media" you will get a list of UK based telephone numbers that you can try instead.
This was the ONLY way I could resolve my last problem and talk to somebody who had any idea what was going on.
Please don't phone 150 or 151 any more. Then they might get the message.
I call on Richard Branson to stop doing publicity stunts and get BASIC Customer Service fixed at Virgin Media.
Happy people: when you called the Indian call centre, did you speak to them in English or Hindi?
Markly Darkly
20-11-2007, 18:33
Sorry Iglu, but you are missing my point - in spite of the numerous complaints, including language difficulties, that was not my experience. I think it only fair to put a balance of comments on the Forum. And of course, remember that people tend to post here to complain rather than to praise, so I suspect that in reality it is not that bad.
Sorry Iglu, but you are missing my point - in spite of the numerous complaints, including language difficulties, that was not my experience. I think it only fair to put a balance of comments on the Forum. And of course, remember that people tend to post here to complain rather than to praise, so I suspect that in reality it is not that bad.
I only asked a question, I did not make a point.
I am just curious, can one speak to them in Hindi?
Sorry Markly, it is THAT bad.
You were freakishly lucky. Some people do get struck by lightening twice. Golfers for example.
SapperGB
20-11-2007, 18:56
The TS ops have always been very polite with me even in the current climate when im screaming down the phone at them.
Sure they can help with simple things such as resetting passwords/modems etc. but when it comes to the serious (OFC yours was serious but a simple fix) problems then TS really dont have a clue.
When I complained to a UK-based CS agent about the awful service I'd had from the Indian callcentre, all he said was "You just have to speak slowly and clearly and they'll understand you".
But why should I have to change the way I speak to accomodate them?
Markly Darkly
20-11-2007, 19:22
What's wrong with speaking slowly and clearly?
When I complained to a UK-based CS agent about the awful service I'd had from the Indian callcentre, all he said was "You just have to speak slowly and clearly and they'll understand you".
But why should I have to change the way I speak to accomodate them?
xspeedyx
20-11-2007, 19:32
When I complained to a UK-based CS agent about the awful service I'd had from the Indian callcentre, all he said was "You just have to speak slowly and clearly and they'll understand you".
But why should I have to change the way I speak to accomodate them?
Why shouldnt you dont you wanna get your service fixed what if someone rang u and said you can you speak slowly would u refuse because its not ur problem to accomodate them
The name of this thread just has to be a **** take. :D
Speaking slowly and clearly does not meen they will understand you. I have lost count to how many times they have asked for my post code and i have had to repeat it several times before them repeating it back to me wrongly. I dont want to have to speak abnormaly to cater for Indian call centre staff. All the other places i ring understand me fine, the bank, the British staff at Virgin why the fook should i have to speak stupidly slow and repeat myself like a broken record for 10 minutes for them still not to understand me and transfer me to the wrong department?, it just adds to the frustration of the initial problem and then waiting on the phone for 40 minutes to have even more problems....
tweetypie/8
20-11-2007, 19:36
Now here's a strange posting.
It appears from the many postings I read here that anyone who gets through to the Indian call centres automatically gives up hope and assumes that there problems will not be solved.
My experience is different. After having had several problems with my account merger which resulted in my Broadband account being shut down and then revitalised, I had to call the Technical Helpline, as my log-in still wasn't working. I made two calls and both the people I spoke to were extremely helpful, knowledgable and very polite. They apologised when I said I couldn't hear them very well and the calls went well. They refunded my call charges and did exactly what they said they would do. I even got an e-mail today to my alternative e-mail address, as promised, to confirm what had happened.
nic e to read your post markly you give credit where it is due well done :clap:
Yes, I'm sure that as with all call centres, UK and India, there are good and bad experiences, and I was probably fortunate to get 'good' both times, but praise where praise is due, and I thought it would make a nice change to see a positive opinion of something that probably gets a disproportionate amount of criticism.
But why should I have to change the way I speak to accomodate them?
Thats what i said when i moved down to London;)
Sometimes on that phone though it dont really matter how clearly and concisely you speak.Or to whom.
I must admit,although i have had some outrageously frustrating times on that phone to Virgin/ntl/?? i have also had some very efficient & satisfactory service along the way,from call centers both here & over there.
I`ve even had the odd laugh or two with sundeep & Co over in bangalore,purely because of the language barriers:D
What's wrong with speaking slowly and clearly?
When I speak to someone in a callcentre I speak as if I'm chatting to them. When there's that rapport I have a lot more confidence in the agent. I don't see why I should have to change the method I use to get my point across just because a company wants to cut some financial corners. I shall NEVER agree with Indian callcentres.
Berealwith
20-11-2007, 23:07
Aye say that to the People in Manchester, India call centers are good.........Tiscali got pipex and sacked 1000, 680 in Manchester and moved thier call center to Bloody India..............I'm sorry but i have no intrest or can i say anyhing good about India taking our jobs.....and people say oh they chat nice...WWWHAT. Get real
---------- Post added at 23:07 ---------- Previous post was at 23:06 ----------
In fact please kill this thread
on in an hour!
20-11-2007, 23:12
Aye say that to the People in Manchester, India call centers are good.........Tiscali got pipex and sacked 1000, 680 in Manchester and moved thier call center to Bloody India..............I'm sorry but i have no intrest or can i say anyhing good about India taking our jobs.....and people say oh they chat nice...WWWHAT. Get real
---------- Post added at 23:07 ---------- Previous post was at 23:06 ----------
In fact please kill this thread
:clap::banghead:
couldnt agree more ;)
the_ghost
20-11-2007, 23:37
sorry but they are a bit useless i have called them on several occasions and 2 of those times they couldnt even find my account and the language barrier is both ways all the conversation consisted of was "excuse me, what and can you repeat that please". Its funny how every call centre i have called that is abroad is crap, im not saying a lot of the british ones are much better but at least you can understand them
Northeast_user
20-11-2007, 23:51
Me: Hello, My internet seems very slow tonight and I was wondering if you could tell me if I was being Traffic managed?
ICC:Your internet is slow and you want to speak to a manager?
Me: No, My internet is very slow and I would like to know if im being traffic managed
ICC:Im sorry but there is not a manager here. But I can put you through to technical support.
Me: (getting a little angry after spending a couple of hours on the phone earlier that week) NO, I don't want to be put through to tech support. I just want to know If I am being Traffic managed or if there is a problem on my end
ICC:Your internet is slow?
Me:Yes
ICC:Would you like me to put you through to technical support? Please give me your account number or telephone number
Me:*************
ICC:Im sorry but that is an NTL number. I'll put you through to one of my colleagues in technical support.
Me: *hangs up and swears alot*
That is an abridged version of a call I made earlier this week, Banging heads off of walls doesn't even get close to the feeling of getting put through to the Indian call centers.
joglynne
21-11-2007, 00:16
If you have no success or faith in the 151 route there is an alternative.
As I have not had much success with BB support I tried the VM Newsgroup (support.broadband.cable) and found the VM technical guys on there extremely helpful. They are based in Liverpool and don't mess about.
Reading the threads you rarely see a reference to spywear etc and they certainly seem to sort out the problems or at least let you know what is going on.
They even book an engineer at your convenience if one is needed.
I've had a few encounters with ICCs in the past. Thankfully, 90% of the time I have called them, VMs have been OK.
Virgin Trains was just funny..
I had a train ticket from Chester to London Euston. Due to a monumental cockup by theTrainLine.com, I had to pick up my return tickets on the return journery to Euston (for some reason, the ticket printer on the outgoing journey had only printed outgoing tickets, despite me having an email, and printed order stated I had return tickets as well).
So, the morning I was coming back, I asked my aunt if Chester station had ticket collection machines. She didn't know, so I phoned Virgin Trains. The operator said, in his best English accent , "Sorry sir, I am in Bangalore, so really have no idea what they have in Chester Station, or where it is". There was a ticket machine (broken) at Chester, but thankfully, the ticket machine at Crewe recognised my card and printed the return tickets.
My worst experience was actually a combination of an Abbey branch, and their call centre.
When my mum died, she had an account with Abbey. I can't remember what it is called, but one of the terms of this account (and the reason it offers a good rate of interest) is that you only deal with the Call centre, not branches.
I didn't know this, so, when I was looking at a statement for the account, and noticed a £1,200 withdrawal apparently made two weeks *after* the acount had been frozen, I went down my local branch demanding to know why.
They said this was a telebanking only account, and I'd need to phone up. I did. Got put throught to someone with a very hard to understand accent.
After about 45 minutes of arguing (and I had been foolish enough to phone on my mobile, so I was fleeced on the so called local rate call as well), he said that as I wasn't the account holder (I had already explained that the account holder was dead, so would be unlikely to phone anyway and that I was executor of the estate as the notes on his screen should have said), I had to go to the branch.
After another visit to the branch, where they repeated the mantra about calling telephone banking, I explained exactly what had happened (including the above phone call), and the poor hapless cashier I was ranting at just called the manager.
I explained the situation again, the manager looked up the account and found out what had happened. As part of the freezing of the account, I had been given a final statement. This statement covered the last year of operation of the account, and included one transaction. It didn't state what *year* the transaction occured in. It occured almost one year before the account was frozen.
As for BT.. I phoned to order ADSL. Be responded saying they had been notified of a fault on the line and that BT had declined the order to release the line for unbundling. They also said that BT would not discuss the nature of the problem with them, so advised me to call BT.
Phoned BT 4 times, each time getting put through to the Indian call centre, who, despite me answering every question they asked correctly, refused to discuss either the fault, or my options for correcting it, just saying I needed to call my ISP.
On the 5th call, they said to call BT Openreach, and gave me a number. I phone Openreach, and got told that they don't deal with customers directly, so I would need to contact my ISP, and shouldn't have been given the number.
On the 6th call, I got through to BT, I got through to a UK call centre, who were more than happy to discuss the problem, in fact, they told me that the problem was my account was down as having a hardwired line (ie non socketed). I pointed out that the engineer had been to fix things since the socket was installed and, indeed, had changed the socket on at least two occassions. The operator said that he'd update my record and hung up.
Sure enough, 20 minutes later, I got a message from Be stating my order had been approved by BT and would be going through soon.
Markly Darkly
21-11-2007, 08:35
Well I 'm glad to see that my posting got a wide range of opinions - some a bit extreme I think and, as I said earlier, missing my point - all I am trying to say is that it is not all bad and also, you are more likely to get postings with complaints then praises, so I am trying to redress the balance. It's worth noting that I have also had bad service from UK call centres as well - in fact probably more of those than with the Indian ones!!
I have to say that I'm with Markly on this one. I've called and got through to India three times and each time, I have been really happy with the service. Not only have they been very helpful, they proactively migrated all my email addresses to a new account when I forgot to ask them about this.
Maybe it's because I talk to my own customers from all corners of the globe that I'm used to talking to people of other nationalities. I would rather have an indian who at least gave some indication that they cared than some people in UK call centres (I('m not saying this is VM) who don't seem to give a flying one about the problems you are having. Try a certain budget airline in Orange for example..
At least with British callcentres you can communicate with them and you know their conversations won't sound forced. Indian accents are very monotone and I have trouble relating to people who speak with what sounds like little or no emotion in their voices.
I had a sense that nothing was being done to resolve my problem. All I got was fobbed off. Somebody will call-back in 48 hours. Nothing. Call again. Somebody will call back in 24 hours. That's when I started looking for UK numbers.
They don't seem to answer the following questions:
What EXACTLY is the problem?
What are VIRGIN going to do to resolve it?
When will it be resolved?
lostandconfused
21-11-2007, 11:17
The VM call centers in india have exactly the same diagnostic tool as the UK ones, it asks specific questions to get to the root of the problem, quickly and the correct answer.
If all the questions arnt askd, or asked wrong and that call is being monitored, the agent will get marked down.
I would imagine that in india the reason it sounds more like a script is the agents are actually reading it from the screen as they are supposed to, in the UK most of the staff want to leave anyway as its not the best paid job and your more likely to get Richard branson cooking you dinner than getting a bonus.
Ive had mixed experience, some good some bad with india, but all the good ones have happened recently so it does appear they are getting better IMO
handyman
21-11-2007, 11:37
The VM call centers in India have exactly the same diagnostic tool as the UK ones, it asks specific questions to get to the root of the problem, quickly and the correct answer.
Yeah right, I'd wager they have basic access and not the sort of access the UK guys get. They also take an age to look at notes on the account and make sense of them. I remember taking calls and getting customers contact details and bringing the account up on screen, whilst they where explaining their problem I would be looking up the account history to see if their where clues left (sales adding an action etc) that may have caused the problem.
From a switch point of view (telco) there is a remote login that we used to use on one switch that was painfully slow, I cannot imagine that it is at all usable from India.
That's just it - reading from a script is very impersonal and I have no rapport with people who do that. The Indians need to 'chat' more but they just don't seem able to do it.
mrmistoffelees
21-11-2007, 11:53
Wait until call centres start to move to the Phillipines and/or Africa..........
Funnily enough some of tmobile's departments are in the Phillipines and in the few times I've spoken to them they seem slightly better than the Indians. Trouble is they all seem to speak English with American accents which is pretty bizarre.
mrmistoffelees
21-11-2007, 12:05
Funnily enough some of tmobile's departments are in the Phillipines and in the few times I've spoken to them they seem slightly better than the Indians. Trouble is they all seem to speak English with American accents which is pretty bizarre.
When i was working for an outsourcing company (US owned and based) the nextthing they wanted to do was get into the phillipines and africa it was due to the rising costs in employing people in India.
This was about two years ago, so im not sure how this has progressed but the concerns that were held at the time were with regards to the quality of the network links which would therefore affect call quality.
Nigeria is supposed to be the next place companies are looking at.
HA! Perhaps while you're speaking to them they'll tell you about a recently-deceased relative who left them £25 million and they need someone's account to pay it in to...
Indian call centers are a joke sooner they move them back to the uk the better
I am no fan of Indian call centres, or any other call centres including UK ones where staff have a strong regional accent owing to the fact I suffer from tinnitus that sometimes makes it difficult to understand. However, unlike some others on here I have no problem explaining to others what I require clearly and succinctly. If you want someone to help you then you need to make sure they understand what you need, mumbling incoherently then becoming abusive helps nobody!
I had cause to ring VM for assistance yesterday as I had no BB connection when I got home from work.
Firstly I rang CS to ask if there were BB problems in my area, she checked for me and as there were no reported outages in the area then referred me to Tech Support.
I rang TS, got clearly spoken Indian lady who was very helpful. I explained clearly to her that I believed my modem was not connecting, described the symptoms, i.e. no Sync or Rdy light and flashing D/S light, told her I'd checked the cables were secure, and that I'd rebooted the modem 4 times before ringing. She thanked me for being helpful explaining the symptoms, agreed that I appeared to have no signal, asked me to reboot one more time so she could monitor it. Then she arranged a technician's visit and said as I'd been on for 10 mins my account would be credited £2.60.
Fortunately the problem resolved itself about an hour later and BB was restored. So I waited until this morning to ring TS to cancel the technician's visit arranged for this afternoon. I spoke to an Indian guy who was exceptionally polite and clear spoken, he cancelled the appointment, thanked me for ringing to cancel, said my account would be credited £1.35 for the 5 minute call. Then he wished myself and family a nice day!
This may have been an exception but at least was two positive experiences of TS and ICC.
handyman
21-11-2007, 12:41
Wait until call centres start to move to the Phillipines and/or Africa..........
I should have mentioned that skys customer service is in the phillipines and not in India.
my only gripe with ALL offshore callcenters is just that!! they are offshore and have our jobs, the public in general need to wakeup all companys with offshore callcenters need to boycotted
What i can never fathom is way they insist that i reboot my V+ box when i have told them over and over and over and over again that my broadband is via a cable modem. Do they not have my account in front of them ???????.
Bunch of ankers :D
Mick Fisher
21-11-2007, 19:55
HA! Perhaps while you're speaking to them they'll tell you about a recently-deceased relative who left them £25 million and they need someone's account to pay it in to...
:LOL::
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