How do you feel about customer service being outsourced? | Telecom Consumer Discussion Forums

jangwl said
I agree that outsourcing will affect the local customers. They will not be able to speak in your accent languages or dialect. It is more of a commercial relationship with you than a personal touch if the officers were from your local town or city. But this is how business is evolving by cutting cost.  

As long as the company can achieve a reduced cost with its customer care service, no culltural detail would matter or of any other nature. After all, English is the same in every corner of the world, there are foreign speakers than are more comprehensible than the native ones. The same for French, native speakers have a particular accent that is distracting your attention from the evolution of the discourse, while a foreign speaker is focused on using common words, not to create stylistic effects through accent

thethunderchild said

Costin said
  English is the same in every corner of the world, there are foreign speakers than are more comprehensible than the native ones. 

This may be the case in Universities or with people who have grown up speaking English as well as their native language right from the start, but on occasion I have spoken to Customer Service and have been quite unable to understand what they say.  As a result, I rarely call Customer Service, trying to figure things out on my own.

Many people in the US dislike talking with people whom they can’t understand because of the accent- and they take it out on the poor customer service rep. (Human nature, I’m afraid) *I* blame the company that cuts costs for this essential service.

What would be good is if the companies that hire these foreign workers would give them on-going training in English pronunciation.

Also, these companies provide “scripts” to their Help desk people, and those “scripts” really need to be improved!  

In this case, it`s a big problem, I can`t understand why the customer care department is avoided and the email is preferred

Probably, in Europe communication is clearer, because you learn from early ages English and French, in some cases German too, it`s largely used in universities, there are jobs exclusively focused on English skills, so it`s almost a must-have

When I used to work for a call center in Microsoft support, I passed an interview with a native speaker and was included in constant communication trainings, just to preserve an adequate accent. In the case of the scripts, each company is eager not to change the beginning and the end of the conversation, but you can improvise after saying How can I help?