This is a sensitive subject… and one I’m kinda passionate about. Everyone’s had that bad tech support experience. Sometimes, it’s with a person with an overseas accent, sometimes it with Joe Sixpack in Arizona with a chip on his shoulder.
The quality of your technical support doesn’t depend on location. Barry in Bangladesh is just as capable as Leroy in Los Angeles to help you.
Yes… there’s a consideration of jobs in America and all that… but the reality is that it is a business decision for a company to make to remain competitive. And frankly, these people need jobs, too.
Just remember, every time you tell me “thank God I’m talking to an American” or “it’s just nice to not have to talk to one of those, you know” thinking I agree with you, know that I wish I could reach through the phone and slap your racist mouth.
Now wasn’t that a pleasant thought?
At the US-based call center in which I most recently worked, about half of our agents grew up in countries other than the United States — mostly in Latin America, China, and the Philippines, though we had a few from India and Africa.
Customer: “I want to speak to someone in the United States.” “I’m in New Jersey.” “What town? What’s the weather like? Who won the World Series/Superbowl/Stanley Cup?” and a dozen more Web-researchable questions intended to verify our location, and the customer still doesn’t believe it — even when speaking with an American-born agent with no discernable regional accent.
Customer: “I (expletive deleted) want to speak with a (expletive deleted) agent who (expletive deleted) speaks English.” Customer proceeds to demonstrate his command of American English is limited to that particular expletive. If his device really could (expletive deleted), he’d have a surfeit of them — rather than the one he believes is broken.
Customer: “I want to speak with a man, because men know their technical stuff.” (I am female.) I assure the customer I have had the same training and expertise. Customer is adamant and insists on speaking with a supervisor. One of our female supervisors agrees to take the call. Customer is even more annoyed and hangs up without resolving her issue.
Worse yet: on a three-way consult with one of our contractors. The contractor uses an idiom I’m not familiar with (which just so happened to denigrate my own ethnicity). I ask “Excuse me?” because not having heard the idiom before, I didn’t understand what he was trying to say. The customer, who was not of that ethnicity, was offended by the contractor’s idiom.
Then there was the Friday afternoon customer who had a deadline of “sundown”. Just because I didn’t draw him out on why that particular timeframe, he assumed that either I was Jewish or married to a Jew and insisted on drawing me out on it, despite company policy to remain neutral…
I know the mindset exists. I’ve never understood it. I’ve been on the receiving end of some version of your first three examples. What kills me is why someone would think that “Oh thank god finally someone from America,” would ever be appropriate. “You know how those people are.” It boils my blood, I tell you.
One issue with phone-based support is voice quality. If for whatever reason, the line isn’t crystal clear (for example, customer is calling from a cellphone in a low-signal area, or from a VOIP line with significant latency), an accent and idiom other than the customer’s native one becomes a lot more difficult to understand. Add to that unfamiliar (to the customer) technical lexicon — and between deciphering the poor signal, the unfamiliar accent, and unusual idioms, and he can have a real challenge on his hands.
While this in no way discounts the possibility of racism, sexism, and/or xenophobia, it is a definite factor in the (often frustrated) customer’s experience.