Speak English.... 21

[snootalope]

Wow, I don't know about you all, but I'm SICK of talking to tech support people who can't speak a darn bit of good english.

I spend a reasonable amount of time on the phone with different support teams and every single one of them from Arcserve to Microsoft Windows 2003 have moved all their support stuff out of the country (USA) and into the middle of places where people can barely pronounce the word Windows.. How the heck are we supposed to get something done when we can't even understand what they're telling us.

I've been playing phone tag with one company for three weeks because everytime they leave me a message and tell me to email them something for a particular support case, I CAN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT THEIR SAYING WHEN THEY SPELL OUT THE EMAIL ADDRESS!!! Of course, when i call back, i get someone who can even pronounce my 5 letter name, and they can't seem to reach the tech who just called me 5 minutes before...

Anyway.. I just had to vent.

If you ask me, IT is going the way of whatever is cheapest is best. It's BS and not customer friendly at all!! If I call the United States support number, I want to talk to someone who's from the United States!!!

 

[chiph]

Hmmm. One of Gateway Computer's selling points is that their support staff are in the US. Don't know if that's really true, but it definitely is a gold star in my mind towards them.

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first

 

[trollacious]

I've purchased and recommended Gateway for this specific reason. My mother had some bad experiences with Dell's tech support, and found that their 48-hour onsite tech support response only started after a 72 hour wait after complaining to them for a week (and various tests they had her run) that her hard drive was dead. And that was complicated by various techs who had such a poor command of English she couldn't understand them. She's since then purchased 3 Gateway computers for home and work, I've purchased one for my daughter, and she also purchased a laptop to take with her to school.

Lee

 

[gbaughma]

See, now I have had exactly the opposite experience between Dell and Gateway.

I remember buying a gateway laptop once, that showed up DOA. I called them up, and said "It's DOA... send me a different one." They wouldn't. They had me TOTALLY DISASSEMBLE the unit, pull memory, hard drive, CDRom, floppy, all out, and ship them the shell back, which they replaced. I never bought another one.

Dell has always taken care of me, overnighting me parts, or even sending them by courier (for my servers at work) in less than 4 hours.



Just my 2¢

"When I die, I want people to say 'There was a wise man' instead of 'Finally, his mouth is shut!'" --Me
--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[ctopher06]

I agree. Dell has better support than Gateway. I have both, and have used both supports. I am just about equal between the two supports for home, but deal with Dell at work ... Dell has been better for business.

Chris

 

[snootalope]

Anybody use anything from CA (computer associates) and have to call for support? ha, good luck..

I just don't think there's any nice way of saying "Sorry, I just can't understand what you're saying."

LOL - it just so happens I have a link to this video... enjoy!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2125098984600032317

 

[LadySlinger]

Oh That's good, that's good....

 

[mikeydidit]

I needed that laugh this late on a Friday. That may have been me when I called Avaya.....

"You don't stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stopped playing."

 

[Sympology]

I'll throw a thought into this...

If you PAY for support, then you should expect a quality service, no matter where you are based.
If the service is FREE or very low cost, then should you get top service, it's a case of you get what you pay for.
I'd forget learning Punjabi or Hindi, South Africa & China may be the next big ones as Indian wages are rocketing.



Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[Grenage]

I expect the support to be included in the price, damnit. I'd like to throw in some tales of total woe but our HP equipment has been very decent. Except one batch of server boards... where all the capacitors blew...


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[tfg13]

I agree with StuReeves. About a year ago, I was looking for jobs, to include outside the USA (I can work unrestricted in the Philippines). I was getting some pretty heavy hits for working in a call center. Granted, I can understand Philippines getting into this arena, as the language they are taught in (school-wise) is English, however, I'm not convinced that it is taught correctly. There are still plenty of barriers that either don't have the technical background to fix the problem, or, don't understand the issue that is being explained. This will happen at almost all foreign countries.

I've worked on a database that was created by Chinese (WebEx), and had some issues understanding what they wanted me to type into a query. The excuses I was giving him was "I am in a noisy server room, and can barely hear him", and to repeat his request (luckily, I knew just enough about Oracle to get the results he wanted).

Oh, and snootalope, I am sinking about how funny that was!

 

[monkeylizard]

IBM Server support always routes me to their call center in Atlanta. Nice folks down there.

The two guys I worked with when calling MS a lot were from the out in the country down in the American south. I know that it can be just as hard for Gupta to understand Billy-Bob as it is the other way around. Be mindful of that when you get a foreign call center. Slow down a little and use your best pronunciation and grammar. It can really help a lot.

Monkeylizard
Sometimes just a few hours of trial and error debugging can save minutes of reading manuals.

 

[Ed2020]

The company I work for outsources a lot of there work to an Indian company. Some of the work is done offshore, some contractors are based in our office.

I had difficulty with their accent to start off with, but have got used to it now. The only thing that still throws me is when they are confirming something you have said (when we would normally nod) they shake their heads, as we would if we were saying "no".

I have to say though these people are *incredibly* knowledgable. As a programmer myself I can't fault them for their technical expertise, or ability to learn our business processes, at all.

Ed.

Please do not feed the trolls.....

 

[jsteph]

We had IBM Basis support for our P690 boxes. The main guy was from Texas and had a slow drawl and was dumb as mud. He'd do things like take the machine down in the middle of the day with no advance warning, just so he could test some new setting or something.

We escalated this and other such complaints to the top and had that guy booted (at least off our account) and then got some guys in India as our new team, still with IBM though. Nice folks, but they'd call us on our cellphones at like 1:00 AM, when it's around lunchtime there--just to chat!! Don't they get it that there's a time difference?

Anyway, as nice as they were, they also proved incompetent, they'd read straight out of the manual--word for word because we had it open too--and act as if that's the expert knowledge they had. If we'd say "yeah, we know that, but that's not working..." they'd say they have no other recourse and the problem couldn't be solved. This is IBM for gosh sakes!!

We fired them completely and found a company that's in the next state over and we're happy as clams.
--Jim

 

[vbSun]

Being someone who had worked and lead sizeable teams in US, UK and India I can hardly find any difference in the technical competencies of the guys regardless of their location. I have had a countable number of bad experiences with people all over (committing to something which they can’t, posing as knowledgeable etc) and a lot of very good experiences as well. There are a lot of good people out there (globally) and a handful of people who I would like to avoid interactions (again, globally).

There are a lot of patents that biggies like IBM and HP are churning out from India; and may be that proves that the folks there are not as bad (intellectually) as we think.

Are we generalizing people from a whole country with (a countable number of) personal experiences that we had?


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The faulty interface lies between the chair and the keyboard.

 

[monkeylizard]

I think the general consensus might be summed up that calling for support generally occurs when you are frustrated after not being able to fix it yourself. If the person on the other end of the line is competent and fixes the problem, I doubt that many of us care where they are or what accent they have. It's when the call doesn't get resolved that the communication difficulty adds fuel to the fire.

Monkeylizard
Sometimes just a few hours of trial and error debugging can save minutes of reading manuals.

 

[vbSun]

Completely with you MonkeyLizard!

Let me introduce another view point to this discussion.

As we all know lot of activities (like Custom Development, Application Maintenance, IT and BPO (voice and non-voice)) are off-shored these days. This requires any Indian company to purchase software/hardware from vendors like MS/IBM/HP. Remember that these Indian companies directly provide support to either big businesses/big client base, making their work crucial to the Service Level Agreements.

This off-shoring activity was/is on the rise for whatever reasons (ex. budget, rare skills demand). If the off-shoring continues to rise, companies like MS will have a bigger client base (who is involved in business critical activities) in countries like India, than in the west. If MS is having a development support team in India that will help a majority of their clients (from whom they can expect the most urgent support cases!)

This way, the bigger share of the client base does not need to talk to a person from the other side of the world and struggle for words while talking to him!


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The faulty interface lies between the chair and the keyboard.

 

[jsteph]

vbSun,
I see your point, and as people--even as technical people, you could make the argument that any given group of tech support drones is going to have a similar amount of duds, and of stars.

Yet the main problem I hear about India specifically is the language issue. I don't care how technically savvy they are, if they misunderstand the stated problem, then the results of the support call are most certainly going to be negative. It's really that simple.

Even if the issue does get resolved, it's almost always going to be after more time and/or tries--since the problem has to continually be clarified or re-explained by both sides to ensure that each side understands each other.

Since most centers route calls based on the country of origin as well as the technical category, the obligation falls squarely on the support center to staff it with people who thouroughly understand not just the language, but the nuances, slang, etc of the caller.
--Jim

 

[Welshbird]

Off te point I know, but I worked with a team of Indian developers a while back, and the UI they designed was very interesting; particularily in choice of colours....

And there was usually a button somewhere marked "UPDATION".

Now that really should be a word!

Fee

The question should be [red]Is it worth trying to do?[/red] not [blue] Can it be done?[/blue]

 

[vbSun]

Jim, I am clear, aware and also was rarely a victim of what you say. I agree with your words and admit that the communication issues must be mended.

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The faulty interface lies between the chair and the keyboard.

 

[kHz]

I like how all the Chinese and Indians are now using English first names.

Sandeep is now Paul.
Chang is now James.

There was an article in the paper recently about Chinese having to choose an English name for college.

Kind of like calling an elk a giraffe and it becomes one.