Inexperienced personnel doing outsourced support

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We’re all aware of the current trend to outsource call centre support to the emerging countries e.g. India. Unfortunately, the staff at these centres on a Saturday evening don’t have a clue about computer support except to follow the script on their screens.

Last night we spent about fifteen minutes, over three telephone calls talking to the support team at one of the largest ISPs in the UK. The nature of the calls was to resolve an authentication issue i.e. the user had the wrong username and password details and the ISP network wasn’t for letting the router connect. Even before making the first call we knew this was the issue through the errors being generated.

However, the support staff weren’t for having anything to do with the information we were presenting, instead they insisted on having us follow them through the script! We knew what we wanted checked but they had to see everything getting turned off and on, modems being switched over, etc. Eventually we spoke with someone with better English and they quickly identified that their customer service representative had incorrectly spelt the username during the customer sign-up a few weeks ago! What! The username was indeed wrong and what a surprise that was to all of us in Fife!!!

The experience was very much like this flash movie from ROFL.

[Please note: This isn't work safe and should only be viewed if you're not easily offended]

These outsourcing operators need to train their staff much better to think outside the script. Time will tell if they improve!

As a company, we always favour suppliers with UK call centres. The haemorrhage of UK jobs to low cost offshore call centres is a threat to all our jobs - remember this the next time you hear of more job losses in a UK company!