Customer Service from India

Dealing with insurance companies I speak with reps in India, South
America and the Phillipines every day and find them very annoying and
condescending most times. They get very annoyed when you ask to have
something repeated because you cannot understand their dialect/accent.
They get irritated when you ask if a procedure or hospital test needs
to be precertified or if it needs a referral.
I have also emailed the local provider rep for these insurance
companies complaining about this but they can only forward my
complaint to their administrator and hope that they relay the message
to the person in charge of the "outsource department".

Supposedly this saves money for the companies because these people
will work for a lot less than they would here, but if the company
looses business due to these outsourced departments is it really worth
it?

When our time warner cable went on the fritz we had to call customer
service and it was someone with a thick accent and husband had speaker
phone on. It was a cat and mouse conversation with both repeating
everything. This was Friday and they could not get a person here until
the following Thursday. I suppose we don't need TV for that long, but
when husband told guy thats fine..just reflect the days we don't use
our cable on our next bill.

Fixed on Monday. The end.

Fortunatley the AT&T reps in India are pretty awesome about 95 percent
of the time. I usually beat them to the punch when they asked If i
unhooked and hooked up my modem and reset it and the router. I say
this is what happened...here's what I did to fix it ...and it's still
not working...what can you do to help me. They are told to treat the
customers like they may never have used a computer before in their
lives. Why I don't know...it's condescending as heck when it
happens...reason one why I switched form verizon to att

Not to be snippy or anything, but you don't really know for a fact
they were in India, do you? Just because someone speaks with a heavy
accent doesn't mean that they are in a foreign country. They may be a
student here on a visa or a recent immigrant. I remember working in
San Antonio and we had many reps who had strong accents who were
living (quite legally) in the city.

"I don't like talking to these people as they are very condescending
and don't speak very good english."

I have a suspicion they feel the same way about us.

But seriously, I find myself inwardly groaning when I get a rep from
India. I understand it's cheaper for the company, but it does make it
harder on the customer due to hard-to-understand accents and things
being lost in translation. I've also found phone calls take longer
with a rep who is based in another country than one based in the U.S.


But here's the dilemma: we either get free customer service based in
another country, or we pay more to have U.S.-based customer service.

Patricia W.,

Hard not to find a service department that has not in some way been
dispatched to Indian or another country in that area.

Several days ago I got a phone call from a company doing a survey on
Energy. The majority if not all the questions were on topic and
pertained to my state. Upon completion of the interview I asked the
caller where she was calling from....Canada.

Makes no sense.

BillR.