Train your phone to talk back to the machine
Geeky, Hardware, Home & Auto May 5th, 2006
For those of you who don't like talking to a machine, there is a great site here that has ways to immediately get a hold of a real person at many institutions.
Of course, the real gamble here is if you'll be connected to someone overseas who may understand you even less than the machine.
Here's a helpful tip: find the places you do business with, and enter their number AND the shortcut keys into your cell phone. Most cell phones will pause by using a comma or the letter 'p'. For example, if you would put this in your phone, you would have a way of reaching a human being at Washington Mutual, enter this in as the number in your address book:
18007568000,,,,0,0 (or possibly 18007568000pppp0p0
(each one of the commas or 'p' characters will pause for a specified amount of time. What character and how much time depends on your phone.
This will dial the number for Washington Mutual, wait 4-8 seconds (depending on your phone), dial 0, wait 1-2 seconds (depending on your phone) and dial 0 again.
If the phone system hasn't changed, you will be connected to a person, without having to look at your phone (or take your eyes off of the road).
Entries
May 5th, 2006 at 10:12 am
“Of course, the real gamble here is if you’ll be connected to someone in India who will understand you even less than the machine”
omg,is that how people think of us these days.Anybody i meet on Skype asks me the same thing too.
i soo hate dell.
i mean,yeah maybe we speak bad english,but then so do a hundred other countries.i really fuckin hate dell.
Anyway thanks for changing that link back to “overseas”
May 5th, 2006 at 10:16 am
oops,i meant ‘changing that word to…’
May 5th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
ya, no prob, it originally was overseas, figured i’d put it back. I think most it people’s problems with outsourcing is that you end up speaking to someone who might have taken a job that you’d rather be doing. Dell is responsible for a lot of this, but there are many others. Of course, there are quite a few support lines I’ve called that have poorly-trained Americans that I can;t understand either…
Ultimately, this is for another post, but I think people get upset with companies going offshore for a few reasons. 1.) that might have been a job that we could have used and 2.) it’s not our fault our cost of living is so high, that it’s easier to employ where it’s not.
In addition to this, people in the US IT industry see these companies as setting a precedent of not being willing to invest in the future of US IT, and hate the company for it, not the outsourced employee.
That’s why I put it back to ‘offshore’. From what I can see, IT people in the US don’t hate people from India or elsewhere, they hate it when US companies use a lower cost of living overseas to justify undermining the country’s IT employee base. Ultimately, it’s not just US IT that is annoyed by this. The more the companies do it, the more news coverage it gets, and the less people enroll in IT when entering college/university. This makes the problem worse.
All in all, just wanted to clarify what most people I know in the US IT industry feel like on this subject. The ones that take the time to understand the issue are immediately annoyed when a foreign representative comes on the phone, because they realize the company they’re giving money to in their support contract is using those funds to develop an IT industry that they’re not a part of…and it’s frustrating to be participating in the destruction of your own IT industry.
The difficulties in understanding over the telephone are an additional frustration, made worse by the reasons listed above. I have yet to actually speak to an offshore rep that spoke very understandable English. On the other hand, offshore reps also tend to be fairly proficient, moreso than local helpdesks who don’t put as much emphasis on training. The problem is that it usually takes 2 or 3 tries to get an answer.
Hope that clears things up for you, and explains a little bit about how most IT guys I know feel about the situation. To summarize, it’s not you, it’s the lack of dedication by US companies to support the US IT infrastructure that annoys most IT pros in the US.
May 5th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
This is a touchy subject, i have a number of indian friends and i understand them very well.
I think its a case of bad accents rather than bad english, the people in call centers understand you, but its hard to understand the accent of the person talking back.
My robotics course is a great example, it is completely multi-cutlural, chinese, english, french and geek. I have the hardest time understanding the french people because they have the worst english accent, they speak fine english but because of the way that they say some words and the speed that they talk (english seems quite a slow langauge compared to french and chinese), we british are a bit dumb and cant quite keep up with it.
I dont have a problem with outsourceing, i can see the benifits instantly, its cheaper which means that savings can be passed on to the consumer, thats how dell can offer such cheap prices, but as long as the out sourcers go throught the same training and checking that an english company would then there are no problems.
I would have just as much trouble understanding someone from liverpool with a strong accent as someone from india or even america if their accent didnt fit with the language they are talking.
As for tech support, I’m setting up my own tech support comany very soon and i would never ever employ someone who couldnt fix any problem i throw at them.
A good tech support will know what to do as soon as they hear the symptoms, not just run thru a list.