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Customer Service Phone Call Story
"Uncommon" Telephone Service
(This story was not happened in a call center company, but it was share by a call center consultant ; this was related by Pat Routledge of Winnepeg, Ontario, about an unusual telephone service call he handled while living in England) It is common practice in England for the telephone company to signal a telephone subscriber [ring the phone] by applying 90 volts between one side of the two wire circuit and ground (called "earth" in England). When the subscriber answers the phone, the phone switches to the two wire circuit for the conversation. This particular subscriber, an elderly lady with several pets, called to say that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called and that on the few occasions when it did manage to ring her dog always barked first. Torn between curiosity to see this psychic dog and a realization that standard service techniques might not suffice in this case, Pat proceeded to the scene. Climbing a nearby telephone pole and hooking in his test set, he dialed the subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring. He tried again. The dog barked loudly, followed by a ringing telephone. Climbing down from the pole, Pat found: a. Dog was tied to the telephone system's ground post via an iron chain and collar b. Dog was receiving 90 volts of signalling current c. After several jolts, the dog was urinating on ground and barking d. Wet ground now conducted -- and the phone rang. Labels: call center, call center agent, call center agent stories |
Funny Hotel Call Center Reservation Call
This story was shared to me by one of my collegue in call center industry. Its a little bit funny that's why i want to share it here at call center agent stories blog. Here it is:As a young call center supervisor in a hotel reservations call center in Texas several years ago, I was responsible for monitoring and coaching new hires during their first few months out of training. Hahahaha! Quite funny... Isn't it? Labels: call center, call center agent, call center agent stories |
Indian Call Center Agent Suffer Abuse
(The following story was excerpt from an article published by SFgate) While irate calls are a mainstay of customer service work in any country, many Indian call center agents say they regularly face particular abuse from Americans, whose tantrums are sometimes racist and often inspired by anger over outsourcing. This vitriol has fueled a "searing anger" among the Indian employees, says Vinod Shetty, a Bombay lawyer who has formed a collective for call-center workers. "A lot of trauma is caused." Debalina Das, 22, a computer help-line agent in the city of Hyderabad in south India, punched the button last winter for a call from the United States. The caller greeted her with a torrent of racial and sexual slurs, accused her of "roaming about naked without food and clothes" and asked, "What do you know about computers?" The diatribe ended with the comment: "This company is just saving money by outsourcing to Third World countries like yours." Such telephone tirades are fueled by outrage over outsourcing, which is expected to move 3.4 million U.S. service-sector jobs overseas by 2015, according to the consultancy Forrester. Most of the work comes to India, where young, low-cost employees now handle a range of American tasks -- they draw cartoons, interpret heart scans, adjudicate insurance claims, reserve flights and chase debtors. Das, who quit the job after four months, said she learned to dislike Americans. "Rarely, there are people who are good," she said by e-mail, "but then others remind me that all they believe in is cursing, and they don't have respect for others." Her opinion is not uncommon among many workers in India's burgeoning call-center industry. Relations between India and the United States have grown closer in recent years. India now sends more students to American colleges than any other country. Indians form the wealthiest and one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the United States. And in the last decade, American companies have increasingly sought Indian customers and employees. Not everyone is happy about the growing ties between the two nations. An anti-outsourcing movement has drawn wide support as layoffs continue to mount at such U.S. companies as IBM, which is cutting 13,000 jobs in Europe and the United States and adding 14,000 in India, according to the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. In the first three months of this year, state legislators proposed 112 bills to stanch the exodus of American jobs, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. Some opponents of outsourcing, often fired workers themselves, have rechanneled their rage at job-slashing CEOs toward India. On the Web forum Is Your Job Going Offshore? (isyourjobgoingoffshore.com/forums/) contributors variously describe India as depraved, as a haven for terrorists, a "giant leech" and a nation of "back-stabbing cowards." It is this kind of commentary that has shaped a perception among India's customer-care workers that Americans are intolerant. "Everybody thinks like that," said Samik Chowdhury, assistant manager at an IBM office in northern India. "Every time, it's racism only." This attitude is not typical of most urban Indians, who tend to admire the United States for its strength and entrepreneurial spirit. In a recent 16-country Pew poll, India had the highest percentage of citizens with a favorable opinion of the United States, 71 percent. The less favorable view, though, is beginning to seep into Indian popular culture. The scripts for a new sitcom called "The Call Center," scheduled to air this winter on the leading channel NDTV, depict Westerners as arrogant, immoral and comically rude. The show's villain, the Indian manager of a call center, is an India-bashing blowhard, a disposition he picked up at an Ivy League business school in the United States. One of the episodes recreates a real-life exchange that occurred in January between an American and an Indian agent that has become notorious among the call center crowd here. On the Philadelphia radio show "Star and Buc Wild," host Troi Terrain phoned an Indian call center pretending to order hair beads for his daughter. The call quickly turned vicious. "Listen to me, you dirty rat eater," Terrain growled, to muffled laughter in the studio. "I'll come out there and choke the -- out of you. You're a filthy rat eater. I'm calling about my American 6-year-old white girl. How dare you outsource my call?" Indian offices have taken measures to thwart such attacks: Agents typically adopt anglicized names, undergo "accent neutralization" and U.S. cultural training, and sometimes claim to be located in the United States. They are taught to suffer attacks politely and try to calm customers. Failing that, many offices now offer callers the option to be transferred to agents in the United States. These humiliations, say observers, are tolerated by a labor force that savors the opportunity to join India's growing middle class. With monthly incomes of about $200, call-center employees live well in a country where many are poverty-stricken. "They feel like it is their duty to swallow insults", says labor researcher Babu Remesh. Sumit Bhasin, a 25-year-old call-center worker for HCL BPO Technologies in the northern Indian city of Noida, says American customers tend to have an "egoistic, bossy kind of attitude." When he was young, he said, he used to dream of traveling to the United States, as many Indians do, but after working in call centers for several years, he is not so sure anymore. However, he loves his job, because he makes $440 a month and gets to learn about high technology like routers, modems and concepts of networking. But for others, the abuse is taking its toll. A group of SBC call center agents, also in Noida, sat recently on the clipped grass in front of the silver-glassed office building where they field Americans' Web connection problems. Callers often dismiss them the moment they detect their Indian accents, they say. "A whole lot of the time, people are yelling," says Kapil Chawla, 23. "They just want to talk to an American." Saurabh Jha, a 22-year-old in blue jeans, says a woman phoned from Texas recently and told him that, thanks to outsourcing, "You are getting money, food, shelter. You should be starving." She berated him for 12 minutes before she finally allowed him to offer advice that promptly fixed her problem: to unplug her computer and plug it back in. "I was speechless," he says. "She didn't even give me a chance." Labels: call center, call center agent, call center agent stories |
"Ghost" Call: A Call Center Horror Story
As i surf the internet, an article about mysterious call in a call center caught my attention. Being a horror fanatic, i read it. It was share by an anonymous call center agent. Here is the story: The two strangest calls I got were both on the same day … in fact they were both on the first day I started as a Tier 2 technical service rep. Creepy, isn't it? Labels: call center, call center agent, call center agent stories |
Indian Call Center Agent Convicted On A Cyber Crime
"Security is not the responsibility of just one individual or department within a company. It is the responsibility of every single person within an organization. It is not a responsibility that can be delegated via e-mails and long distance teleconferences." Bangalore Police arrested Nadeem Kashmiri; an Indian call center agent and the primary suspect for the lost funds from a score of customers of HSBC bank in the UK.Nadeem Kashmiri is being charged in India with stealing customer data that was sent to Nadeem's accomplices in the UK. Nadeem's accomplices assisted him in withdrawing funds from customers' HSBC bank accounts between March and May of the current year (2008). Approximately twenty customers of HSBC reported that funds had disappeared from their accounts. This prompted an investigation by bank officials, who found that US$424,689 had been diverted by Nadeem and his associates. It is possible that additional HSBC customers may come forward in the future and report losses that will raise that figure. HSBC has announced that it will reimburse its customers whose accounts were subjected to theft by Indian call center agent Nadeem and his associates. During HSBC's investigation, it was discovered that Nadeem had provided an invalid cell phone number and address in his employment application. He also did not disclose his previous employment with Accenture. Once he was identified as a suspect, he could not be traced to his residence because HSBC did not know where he lived. London-based HSBC saved $215 by not having a standard background check conducted on Nadeem. Background checks are now being insisted upon by many international clients of commercial outsourcing facilities in India, but their application at captive facilities has been uneven. Western firms that experience security problems offshore have most likely been sending out warning signals that were ignored, signals that involve problems with recruiting, training, operations, and quality assurance. In HSBC's case, to have an Indian call center agent immediately begin violating security rules -- as soon as he came out onto the call center floor -- indicates a failure by HSBC management to properly monitor employee activities at the most crucial period of their employment. Labels: call center, call center agent, call center agent stories |