Personally, I dont think it's racist and strongly believe it's more practical all round..
Obviously some are better than others, but I've had some bad experiences and it seems something of a lottery wether you'll get a decent service or not.
BT seem to have a hell of variation in standard of people used, I had an absolute nightmare with my broadband only last week and ended up being told I would have to ring back as he didn't understand my problem, I had no problem with my second call which lasted half the time.
British Rail can be useless at times as well, Being asked if you're sure there's a station in your home town can only suggest there are problems with locations (despite spelling the name out twice)...
My biggest gripe with it all though is with the elderly in mind, many older people have problems hearing, and hearing my mother in law on the phone recently was verging on the upsetting as she ended up quite tearful....
It's going to take a long time to convince me that foreign call centres are a good idea or provide a good service...
Having said that, the worst one I got at work was a Scottish one, the accent was so broad I hadn't a clue what he was on about, and though at one stage it was a piss take, it was so bad..

As I've said, I've had some shocking customer service in the past, and most of it has been down to the company themselves, rather than the employees. I think what's happened is that companies have seen India as a cheap option, completely forgetting that employees are only as good as you train them, and that a vibrant job market means you still need to treat them well. My company have had problems occasionally with the move to India, but none that couldn't be resolved by proper training and giving the employees a reason to put their all into the job.

The problem with foreign call centres is that if the staff aren't well trained, or if their standard of English isn't good enough, the callers will automatically attribute the main problem to the employees' nationality, which I feel is unfair, but as callers tend to be stressed anyway, it's understandable. I strongly feel that for many purposes, the location of a call centre is immaterial, as I've spoken to many crap call centres based in the UK, and have seen first hand the enthusiasm and diligence of my company's Indian employees.

You may not consider it racist, but I think I have good cause to feel uncomfortable about my Indian colleagues seeing any of those adverts.

To be fair, I've had as many negative experiences with British call centres as Indian ones. The main difference is that when I hear an Indian accent on the other end of the phone, I get both the feeling that the person I'm talking to doesn't have any real ability to act on my request because they're on the wrong side of the planet, and the feeling that the company doesn't actually care about my request because they're trying to keep the chatter as far away from themselves as possible.

Of course, I don't think either point is necessarily less likely to be the case whether the call centre is in Daventry or Delhi, but having a local call centre does make it feel as though they're being a bit less bare-faced about the fact they wish they didn't have to deal with you. There are negative associations with outsourcing, not least because we're all aware that the jobs have been moved over there purely because the labour's cheaper. It doesn't send me a very positive message about any company that does it.

Working in the software engineering industry, I am obviously no stranger to outsourcing to India - our company does do it and I deal with the workers personally. The code they write is usually of a decent standard (usually - it's more likely to come back crap than anything written in-house though) The big problem is almost entirely communication. In several cases it's taken several times longer to get code from the contractors simply because in they don't understand how we work and what I'm asking them to do. I get frustrated by it a lot and I can only imagine that if I wasn't being paid to deal with them, it would be a lot worse. If someone offered me a job at a company and said they had all its coding done in-house... well, I wouldn't think myself racist to consider that a plus.

In-house and outsourcing to India are two different issues, though. My Indian colleagues are 'in-house', and although there have been occasional problems with communication, it's really just down to different cultures in the end. I've had similar problems with American colleagues, and I can't imagine the same remarks being made by Brits if call centres were outsourced to the US. With mutual understanding and effort, problems with communication can be overcome.

My point, which I think is missed by many people in the UK, is that if the company involved think of India simply as a cheap option, then there won't be enough training for the employees to give a decent service, or that the company won't be 'joined-up' enough to act on the service given. The idea that the closer people are to you, the better the service, is completely false. Certainly it doesn't matter where my former job is carried out, and even my current job could easily be moved anywhere, as long as the knowledge and skill goes with it. I can certainly sympathise with people feeling that companies moving jobs to India is a negative thing, but the bottom line is that they wouldn't notice the difference if it was done properly, because the service, is, as ever, the main issue.

Personally, I find myself thinking less of companies who capitalise on the common misunderstanding of such a complex issue, not least because it seems to legitimaize a lazy, knee-jerk, racist opinion that Indians somehow aren't as good as us.

Clearly, the correct training and of course a good command of English is the main issue....
I think one problem is as you say, many people are already wound up by having to ring in the first place, if you add this to the often awlful automated switch board, by the time you get to a human voice, you're already set to cheesed off mode...
One other perhaps strange point..Someone in my family works for a bank that claims 2 out of every 3 complaints are from customers complaining about foreign call centres, the companies answer to the problem was to stop the staff talking about it!!

Actually, it's not at all racist.

It's xenphobic.

Xenophobic, even.

Thing is, to vehermently agree for a moment, I've had lousy service and great service, and there seems to be no definitive case that either 'the UK' or ' somewhere else' is especially better. I've had nothing but trouble with BT (UK, I think?) but all good stuff with my bank (India-based, I think...wherever they are, their training has been spot-on).

It's down to companies hiring those with a less-than-great grasp on English...but, again, I've had trouble making myself understod to taxi firms from one town across, so that's not just a geographical issue.

Yeah, I'm not keen on "UK Only Call Centre" at all. It...niggles me.

Plus, let's face it, it's not we're short of home-grown morons.

The thing is... if a company has call centres in its own country, what that suggests to me is that a greater level of communication and cohesion is possible. I know first hand that as soon as a request leave the country it gets bogged down in a mess of conflicting priorities and time zone clashes, and that's to say nothing of any language barrier.
This is the case whether I'm dealing with someone in France, America or India, all of which I do.

If I know a company is outsourcing, that in itself suggests certain qualities that inevitably tend to poorer service. I'm not saying all internationall call-centres are rubbish, nor that the people on the other end of the phone can do nothing but talk moon-language at me. What I am saying is that there are less things that can go wrong if a company and its call centres are within striking distance of each other, physically and culturally. (regarding the latter point, I've had gig tickets sitting in the wrong depot for a week before the problem was discovered because someone didn't know how to write the date in UK format, and I've had programming requests come back wrong because people didn't know that Gatwick is a London airport.) It's not xenophobia, it's just maths.

It depends on the nature of the service. A couple of years ago I rang WYmetro to find out which bus I needed to get somewhere in Leeds. That's the sort of time I'd expect local knowledge to help. If I just want to pay a bill, I don't think it really matters.

Presumably, they told you there were only three buses a day, and they travel at a rate of one mile every seven hours. Buses in West Yorkshire are cunts.

>The thing is... if a company has call centres in its own country, what that suggests to me is that a greater level of communication and cohesion is possible. I know first hand that as soon as a request leave the country it gets bogged down in a mess of conflicting priorities and time zone clashes, and that's to say nothing of any language barrier.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I've experienced plenty of UK-based companies that don't seem to know what the hell they're doing, and even my own company doesn't have a great record in that regard. If I can talk to someone over the other side of the world in real-time, I don't see why I can't do business with them.

>It's not xenophobia, it's just maths.

It's not maths, it's incompetence. All the problems you list can be dealt with if the company cares enough. Sure, local knowledge can help in some cases, but it's perfectly possible to hire someone over here who has lived in a city all their lives and not know the first thing about its geography.

> It's not maths, it's incompetence. All the problems you list can be dealt with if the company cares enough. Sure, local knowledge can help in some cases, but it's perfectly possible to hire someone over here who has lived in a city all their lives and not know the first thing about its geography.

I can't help but agree. I'm plagued by people who ask me directions on the street (I have no idea why) and I'm of zero use. Proximity doesn't guarantee ability.

The liklihood of a good grasp of English is higher, sure. Everything else...well, okay, you may know the bus scedule if you live in the area. Or you may have no idea, being a driver who just took the job and moved to the town. Not a large enough liklihood to base your call-centre-placement decision on. (Besides the whole 'Oh, no, hang on, I remember now, that bus stopped running three years ago. I always forget that" factor.)

A guy who's getting the info from a computer could be doing it anywhere. Makes no difference. The only difference is in making sure he (or she) is well trained.

Not only is it xenophobia, but it's a low-lying public xeniphobia now with all-new corporate backing. (Okay, OTT. But yeah, it's about training not area code.)

Coming soon: "Tonight's Love Island is sponsored by the BNP." :-)

*puts tommy boyd argument hat on*

Ian Symes wrote > Presumably, they told you there were only three buses a day, and they travel at a rate of one mile every seven hours.

Tanya Jones wrote > Sure, local knowledge can help in some cases, but it's perfectly possible to hire someone over here who has lived in a city all their lives and not know the first thing about its geography.

Quite. It didn't get off to a good start when they didn't know where Headingley was. I think they were from Leeds, mind.

I've called small computer software/hardware companies and been able to speak to the main developers and managers. That support was excellent because you talk to the people who know stuff, and are able to listen and can do something about it. When a company becomes larger, it's far less likely you can do that. Good communication between the customer facing support team and all the other departments in the company, in both directions, is vital - I just don't think it scales very well.

So call centres are just another layer of separation; and although overseas call centres provide the same service as a UK one, they feel even more disconnected from what the rest of the company is doing.

Discussing a local, personal issue with somebody across the globe is a huge leap in the way people and businesses communicate - and it's happened in one lifetime. You can take this in two ways - either you're part of a worldwide network of people and lives and integration and happiness, or you're left feeling an aging, lonely and insignificant part of a rapidly growing world.

What you're seeing isn't xenophobia, it's the fear and recognition of mortality.

Also, the hold music sucks.

Okay, please explain to me where the xenophobia or racism turns up in this logic:

1. My experiences with outsourced work, be it coding or call centres, is generally (and in my case I actually mean uniformly) worse than with locally performed work.
2. As a result, I believe that locally undertaken work has less chance of causing me a problem. Not no chance, but definitely less chance.
3. Therefore, I find it a positive selling point if a company can promise me no outsourced work.

Note that I'm not saying outsourced work can't be good and local work can't be bad, just that in the bulk of my experience, the reverse is true. I'm aware that good training can overcome the multiple factors that can cause problems, but for whatever reason, it often doesn't, and I'm just as happy if they remove those factors by getting people to work in their first language, in their own culture, in a time zone closer to my own. I wouldn't expect a call centre in Oxford to deal with bank customers in Osaka any better than I think people in Bombay deal with customers in Brighton. It's just a fundamentally confusing way to do things.

I have literally never had my problem dealt with properly by an outsourced call centre. Never. Usually what happens is that I'm told it's correct and I'm later informed that there's been a fuck up by the person who told me it was all fine. For instance, to use a real-world example, my gig tickets are awaiting delivery on the 3rd of October instead of the 10th of March. All it's ever resulted in is me having to call back and get a phone number or e-mail address for someone higher up in the company. Is it any wonder I want to avoid them? If a company admits they can't train outsourced workers properly and says "okay, we can't do it, we won't try any more, it'll all be local from now on since we're clearly having a better success rate in that area" why would I, as a customer, see that as a negative thing?

And christ, all that before we've even touched on the socio-economic issues of sending work to other countries.

> I have literally never had my problem dealt with properly by an outsourced call centre.

*shrugs* I've never had a single problem with an outsourced call centre. Conversely, I've had both great service and lousy service from various UK centres. Which proves only my experience of both, nothing more.

> and I'm just as happy if they remove those factors by getting people to work in their first language, in their own culture, in a time zone closer to my own.

Language-fluent will do me fine - the UK has its own diverse employment base speaking English as a second language - and I've no idea why culture or time zone are issues. If they're working when we're working, it makes no odds to me.

> It's just a fundamentally confusing way to do things.

Well, it's also cost-effective. But, as you say, let's not get into the economic thing. the fundamental question on the table is the connotations of the phrase "UK Only Call Centre".

As one vaguely normal liberal reading this, the implication of 'UK-based good, outside-UK bad" is kinda hard to shake - and doesn't prove a damn thing. How about "Fully-trained and efficient call centres guaranteed"? That's a REAL promise.

"Fully-trained and efficient call centres guaranteed" would do me fine. My experiences tell me that the phrase "UK Only call-centres" equates with "Fully-trained and efficient call centres slightly more likely" but that's enough for me to find it preferable.

> If they're working when we're working, it makes no odds to me.
Well, like I say, the problems I've had with outsourced companies (though I'm thinking more of the programming stuff I do than call-centres here) aren't simply that they didn't know what button to press, is that's they didn't understand what I was asking, or they understood the wrong thing, or that they start work 3 hours before I get in and finish 3 hours before I leave, which can mean a 20-hour lead time on problems that could take 20 minutes...

> or that they start work 3 hours before I get in and finish 3 hours before I leave

Okay, that I can't argue with. Though whatever company it was, I'm astounded. What moronic organisation expects UK callers to conform to the call-centre's time? I've never heard of that before. Shocking.

James, I think your problem is with outsourced work, rather than work performed by people not in the UK. This has never been my point, so maybe I haven't been clear enough.

I work for a global company, and can assure you that in my experience, problems only arise as a result of cultural differences or because of insufficent training. As part of my job, I devise requirements for coding, with the coding being done in Bangkok, by employees of my company. The only problems that arise are those which would arise with anyone doing coding for something with which they are unfamiliar, so assumptions that myself and my colleague make are not those which they would make. This can prove to be valuable, as the guys in Bangkok have pointed out many times in the past where myself and my colleague have been unclear because we're so familar with what we're doing.

Also, Andrew is correct: if companies move jobs abroad, the office times need to be adjusted to serve the market. This is followed in my company, so call centre (or whatever job) timings that don't suit you are a sign of a crap company, not the principle being wrong in itself. I really don't buy that service abroad will equal bad service, seeing as the UK can provide pretty appalling home-grown service. Outsourced service may be bad, but that's nothing to do with location.