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June 28, 2005 at 5:51 pm #18897AqeelParticipant
Just came across this interesting article at the times of india site: “HYDERABAD: Apart from the snazzy accent, confident diction and good communication skills, call centre executives can do with an ability to endure an earful of swear words every day at work.For customers can give free rein to their vocabulary from their secure distance. And Indophobia inching higher in the west over the loss of jobs, call centre conversations can turn nasty once the caller discerns from the accent that he is talking to an Indian. “Hearing gaalis (abuse) are part of our job. If you cannot handle them, you can’t work here,” says the HR manager of a call centre. Agents say four-letter words are casually flung by many US customers. Some of the abuses are not part of what they teach you in accent training classes. Not being familiar with the street language of Tacoma, Texas, call centre executive can be left baffled by some of their conversations, sometimes not even knowing whether one has been sworn at. ” read full article here.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1127347,curpg-1.cmsAnyone here in BBB got nasty stories to share with us from a call center?
June 28, 2005 at 10:52 pm #125145TigerbladeParticipantit’s not a particularly nasty story, but it was rather frustrating i suppose. right after i got my new laptop, i was having problems with the asterisk key * not working properly all the time. so of course i call tech support, and get stuck talking to some guy who i can barely understand. now understand i have no doubts about this person’s knowledge or training, it’s just that he had such a strong accent that i could barely make out what he was saying.
after about 20 minutes of going back and forth trying to get him to understand what i’m talking about, we start troubleshooting, etc… eventually the problem was solved. the problem was that it took well over 45 minutes to fix what was a relatively simple problem, and it’s due largely to the fact that his english was rather poor. i understand that everyone needs a job, and many jobs are being sent overseas, particularly tech jobs like that. but if you barely speak english, you shouldn’t really be working a call center where the majority of callers will be speaking english.
i can understand why some of these people get overly upset and start swearing at the person on the other end of the phone, and personally i think that’s a little too much. sure i’m frustrated with not being understood and not understanding the other person, but i’m not gonna start yelling at them.June 28, 2005 at 11:57 pm #125146AqeelParticipantOne of my friend who is a call centre exacutive after reading this article e-mailed me and said: Customers like to yell and bitch. Its their nature. It doesnt matter where the call center is.. India or France or Germany. I can understand people might be especially pissed when talking to someone with an accent because in the average white american’s book someone with an accent is automatically considered an idiot.
I used to work at two different inbound call centers catering different products and to different types of people. The cussing however was the only thing common, regardless of the accent of the accent of whoever answered the phone.
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