Be Excellent To Each Other

My recent experiences

BT Infinity, called them and asked them to look at my speed drop. Said they would call me back on my mobile the next morning, they called me on my home number in the afternoon when I was out!

So called back and was told by a somewhat dishonest agent that I would need to re-sign with BT for 18 months so they would send me a new BT Home Hub (which I don’t use) She then went to lie some more and tell me that only a BT Home Hub could guarantee my speed and they wouldn’t look at the line unless I had one. Not planning to change from BT but will never resign now just keep on month to month.

Admiral Insurance, called to remove my written off car and add the new one to my policy , as its peek call time through to India and they end up adding the wrong type of car and registration number. Called back the claims line and insisted on a guy from their Welsh centre who sorted it out

They are a nightmare, company's not having these are going to be a consideration from now on.

I must say, I dislike the idea that having a non-UK based call centre is automatically a bad thing. Plenty of UK-based call centre staff are just as awful.

Yeah, all the problems described here could easily happen with UK staff. The only thing you're guaranteed with UK call centres is that you and the person on the other end of the line will be able to understand each other, which admittedly can be half the battle when you're trying to get things sorted out. As long as me and the other person can understand each other I don't care whether they're from Glasgow or Outer Mongolia.

Frankly if they are in Glasgow I've probably got a better chance with the Indian folks

Weirdly I've also called both BT and Admiral in the past week. BT in my regular "you've sent me an invite to join up on fibre internet, have you actually connected my cabinet yet" phone call (They haven't BTW) and Admiral to add Mrs T to the insurance of the Beemer.
Both calls were totally fine, I think you just got through to crappy people.

I always have issues with BT as its all in India, they either get it wrong or all so tied up with bad scripts (not their fault).

BT have been flagged as having the worst customer service so don't know why I'm surprised, for them its probably by design as it stops me calling them unless its a real issue!!

Indeed. Many of my monthly calls to Tesco credit card fraud team (Glasgae) are challenging, for both of us.

I've had a fucking nightmare with EE lately. Both their UK and foreign call centres were equally as shite, though the one useful bloke I did get to speak to was from the UK call centre even though he was a bit difficult to understand as he was very Irish.

Similar - as long as they can understand you then the location doesn't matter.

But let's be clear since some are getting in early to point out that they're not remotely racist against indians - it's that breakdown in communication that is annoying and frustrating. Second-language English is not ideal in a customer service situation where understandability is paramount.

So I too greatly prefer UK-based call centres for that reason. I've often laboured to make myself understood (the last time was with Virgin Media) and then insisted on a transfer to the UK, where I resolved the problem in 2 minutes.

Origin use Indian centres for live chat support and I've had occasion to chat to them recently. That works ok but I definitely have to type in a slightly more simplistic and verbose way to make sure the full meaning of my query is conveyed, and even then I had to go back a few times to repeat the same conversation when it wasn't fully resolved the first time.

It's also the case that call centres in India are cheap. Also cheap is providing limited training. So a company that is looking to do their support on the cheap is likely to not only site call centres in foreign locations, but also to provide just the minimum of training in order for them to do their job.

Never had a problem ordering a curry.

Racialist!

And also. Centres.