[gui-talk] Call Centers Return to U.S.

Fri Dec 12 17:52:05 UTC 2008

hello. Just so there's no misunderstanding. Thank you for your thoughtful 
response.
Than
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "taraprakash" <taraprakash at gmail.com>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Call Centers Return to U.S.

Hi Joel and all. Joel I too sympathize with the all pervasive human faculty
that prepares fertile ground for misleading and misreading. I reread my mail
to find if I suggested that you bore any grudge against any nationality. I
couldn't find any instance for that. Let us not bring a topic of universal
significance down to a low level of nationality. Nationality is a muddled
concept. It has nothing to do with efficiency in solving someone's technical
problems or speaking English with a specific accent. As I said earlier that
the jobs which have been outsourced to Bangalore or other places in Asia
belong to US and I have no objection if they are moved back to the place
where they originally belonged. I might pick up a job in one of them here in
Orlando. But to give customer satisfaction as a reason for bringing them
back, is delusional. Those who are not satisfied the way English is spoken
or understood in Asian call centers may still have problems in English when
these tech support jobs are moved back to the US. In the US English is
spoken with different accents. One might have issues with Palin's English,
Obama's English, his grand mother's English, Hispanic English, Afro American
English or what not. All these are prominent registers of English in the US.
When the rep won't speak English like you, you may again start assuming
their location somewhere in India or Phillippines, even though they are
based in the US territory of Porto Rico. When you ask them where they are
based, you won't trust their response. By the way, you should never trust
these fellows when they tell their location, according to the universal call
center policies, they are not supposed to answer such questions. If they do,
it cannot be an honest answer.

Best
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joel Deutsch" <jdeutsch at dslextreme.com>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 1:50 AM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Call Centers Return to U.S.

> hi,
>
> Thanks for providing so much interesting additional information about this
> topic.
>
> If I have offended you, please accept my apology. I do want to explain
> that
> in many instances, I actually have asked the person on the other end of
> the
> line where their call center was located. Whether Manila or Seattle, this
> is
> how I knew. As I tried hard to explain in my post, I bear no prejudice
> against anyone for their nationality. I regret that you don't believe
> this,
> and I sympathize with your strong feelings, nonetheless.
>
> Thanks again for your thoughtfuyl and helpful reply.
>
> Sincerely,
> Joel
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "taraprakash" <taraprakash at gmail.com>
> To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 9:31 PM
> Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Call Centers Return to U.S.
>
>
> Hi Joel and all. I think the quality of tech support varies from service
> to
> service. I do not like buy.com tech support much, but I was never
> disappointed with Dell customer care. Both have call centers in India, not
> necessarily in Bangalore (now called Bangluru) though. The reason in
> difference in quality is the result of the expense the manufacturers want
> to
> incur towards tech support. I would not expect Joel, whom I know only from
> some balanced e-mails, to be so judgmental about the call centers at
> Bangalore and Manila. For all we know the person who Joel thought was
> sitting in Bangalore or Manila was actually talking from Sambalpur,
> Sikandarabaad or Seoul. I did read the news item in Washington Post where
> the writer specifically made clear that As the businesses in US found this
> opportunity of saving on tech support by using call centers in India,
> there
> was a mad rush and finally the quality of the call centers suffered as the
> demand exceeded supply.
> The reason, Joel, that the quality of the call centers is not satisfactory
> does not lie in the fact that they are in Bangalore, on the contrary, the
> reason for your dissatisfaction and that of many others, perhaps, is that
> they are not based in Bangalore. These call centers are more likely based
> in
> some other cities in Asia.
>
> Having said that, I must clarify that I am not defending call centers. I
> have been a staunch critic of globalization. My intention is only to clear
> some misconceptions which are sometimes cherished so dearly that they
> become
> truer than the truth. One such misconception is that the support provided
> from the US soil will be more efficient and less foreign accented than
> when
> provided from Bangalore. In my interaction with representatives of as
> diverse facilities as Medicaid, Barns and Nobles, Radio Shack, Humanware,
> access lynx etc I did not always find that to be the case. I believe that
> the tech support should come back to the US not because it will give
> efficiency, rather because it will give employment to Americans.
> My final point does not add to the discourse of the call centers. I should
> clarify for Joel's sake that Hindi and Bengali are two major languages of
> India However, there are as many native speakers of these languages in
> Bangalore as they are in Orlando, Florida. And you are thousand times more
> likely to hear English being spoken in Bangalore than in Miami.
>
> Hope I could put things in to perspective even though it is almost
> midnight
> and I am already half asleep.
>
> Regards
> TP
> TaraPrakash
> Dept. of English, Writing Program,
> University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL. 32826.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
>
> From: "Joel Deutsch" <jdeutsch at dslextreme.com>
> To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 4:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Call Centers Return to U.S.
>
>
>> Albert,
>> I haven't been as fortunate as you. I've had a lot of horribly
>> frustrating
>> experiences with tech support phone people in Bangalor and Manila. I
>> don't
>> even want to go into it, because there are portions of that Washington
>> Post
>> article that pretty well nail the kinds  of hassles I've experienced. I
>> only
>> want to say, in case it's necessary, that I'm not biased in general
>> against
>> anybody because of their ethnicity or nationality, and I'm not the least
>> put
>> off by accents unless someone's English is actually impossible for me to
>> understand. I have friends and acquaintances from more than one foreign
>> country, speak and read and write Spanish at a very modest level, and
>> know
>> a
>> little Russian, too. It's nothing to do with thinking poorly of people
>> whose
>> first language may be Hindi or Bengali or Tagalog. But as I said, the
>> article includes descriptions of the kinds of impossible situations I've
>> found myself in, wasting a lot of time and being made pretty crazy by
>> sometimes extremely polite people who must imagine they're doing their
>> jobs.
>> By the way, my worst experiences  have come with making calls to Amazon
>> phone support, which went overseas a few years ago, before which the
>> person
>> would be in Seattle or Vancouver or Salt Lake city and we didn't have
>> problems communicating, even though I sometimes brought the unfamiliar
>> problems of being a screen reader user to the call because that was
>> pertinent. But since overseas people began to answer that toll free line,
>> I've had some really awful experiences. Now I just do the best I can on
>> my
>> own, and if I really can't get around some difficult problem or seeming
>> malfunction on Amazon, I ask a sighted friend to help me, if that's what
>> I've got to do. I'm not going through that stuff at Amazon anymore if I
>> can
>> help it.
>>
>> IMHO, of course!
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: "albert griffith" <albertgriffith at sbcglobal.net>
>> To: "'NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List'" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 12:05 PM
>> Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Call Centers Return to U.S.
>>
>>
>> I'll be interested to see if these services are around in a few years.
>> I've
>> had good experiences with foreign tech people but I've heard the
>> complaints
>> of others.  Sure a well spoken person with an American accent might be a
>> little more to my liking but I've never had to discontinue a call because
>> I
>> couldn't understand the support person and I wouldn't pay extra for the
>> privilege of being assured of an American.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
>> Behalf Of Joel Deutsch
>> Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 2:21 PM
>> To: NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List
>> Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Call Centers Return to U.S.
>>
>> don,
>>
>> thanks very much for posting this Washington Post article. I read general
>> and tech articles in the New York Times and my hometown Los Angeles
>> Times,
>> and I'm aware of the issue for sure, but I never would have caught this
>> Post
>>
>> piece if you hadn't provided it. it's really informative and, in the way
>> it
>> handles telling the story, "fair and balanced," although I have issues"
>> with
>>
>> the popularizer of that expression, I say with a mischievous grin and
>> shoes
>> on both ffeet.
>>
>> I deleted the article text but retained its URL below just in case
>> anybody
>> missed it and would like to go to the Post and see it there.
>>
>> Joel
>>
>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/10/AR2008121003
>> 574.html
>>
>>
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