My Indian Call Center Adventure

Don't get all up my ass about being xenophobic. It's no secret that I have major problems with the parade of IT jobs being sent overseas, and I have even more problems with the way call centers are being run. You don't work in IT as long as I have without recognizing the idiosyncracies in speech that are characteristic of India, no matter how many Shilpas identify themselves as Sharon and Sanjeevs identify themselves as Steve. Frankly, I'd rather deal with Shilpa and Sanjeev, because at least then I know with whom I'm speaking. I've worked with people from India, I've had friends from India, and I have no problem understanding people from India.

My beef isn't with people in India who take these jobs. I can't object to someone who just wants to earn a living, and often these call center employees are as exploited as any other worker dependent on a giant multinational corporation. I really try to separate out the individual person at the other end of the phone from the policies to put him there and the companies that make their jobs well-nigh impossible to do properly, but sometimes it's difficult.

My place of employment is a Dell shop. We deal with Dell for all desktop machines. And usually Dell's business customers are routed to American customer service reps. We had a particular line of desktops with heat problems, and as the motherboards went, our tech support guys would call Dell and get new motherboards. One time the call was routed incorrectly, and our guy ended up having to deal with no fewer than three different people reading the same script about the tests that had to be done "in order to identify the problem." He ended up calling again and again until his call was routed to someone in the U.S.

Mr. Brilliant and I have succumbed to the siren song of high-definition television. We don't go out all that much and don't spend much on entertainment, so the prospect of spending $130/month for pay TV doesn't seem as horrifying as it would otherwise, particularly when it gets you almost 300 channels of nothing you'd want to watch. Right now we have about 147 pieces of this lovely Craftsman TV stand strewn all over the living room floor, waiting for one or both of us to find the Rosetta Stone that will decipher the assembly instructions, but if you want to schedule installation of the HD line, you have to get on the phone. So yesterday, with almost no voice in the seventh day of being down with the Winter in New Jersey Crud, I called Dish Network to arrange for the HD receiver and the installation.

The call center rep identified himself as "Maxwell", and I almost immediately realized that I had reached a call center in India. After I had admonished "Maxwell" twice to please speak into the microphone, he started by asking me for my account password. Not my account number, but my account password. There IS no account password, other than the one you use to log into your account online, which apparently was NOT the "password" to which he was referring. When I said I didn't know what he was talking about because there is no account password other than the one used for the online account, he told me to ask my husband for the password.

That's when I let him have it. I told him that assuming a woman didn't know the password because her husband had it was insulting (especially when it's my name on the account), and asked if he was in the U.S. When he said no, I said "If you were in the U.S., you would know how insulting it is to tell a woman to ask her husband for information just because she doesn't know what the hell you're talking about because you're asking for something that doesn't exist." He then asked me AGAIN to ask my husband for the password. I also said I hoped that the call was "being monitored for quality assurance" because the quality assurance on this call was God-awful.

I asked to be transferred to someone in the U.S., and he said he couldn't, that calls were routed to the next available operator. I told him I was hanging up and that I would keep calling till I get someone in the U.S. I tried again and this time I got "Tanesha". I had a pretty good idea that Tanesha wasn't a name that someone in an Indian call center would identify as American, and when I asked if she was in the U.S., she said yes, she was in Philadelphia.

I nearly wept with joy and gratitude. Tanesha didn't ask me about a password. I explained that I had some questions about the best way to set up my HD setup, what the various costs were, the differences between the two receivers that were my options, what the installation rebate was, and what the commitment was. Then she set up the appointment. Not one question about a password. And she was even politically correct by asking if I celebrate Christmas before wishing me a merry one. I thanked her profusely for her assistance abd said I hoped this call was being monitored because I wanted her boss to see what a good job she's doing.

In retrospect, it occurred to me that "Maxwell" was probably asking about my account number, not my password. But once there was that breakdown in communication, the fact that these call centers tend to work by written script in an attempt to avoid some of the issues of national idiosyncracies in the language cited in the article linked above became an insurmountable obstacle to completing the call. It showed me that "Maxwell" wasn't equipped to do more than take orders for installation.

I'm the kind of customer that a company like Dish Network should embrace tightly. We've had the service for eight years, despite the relentless sales pitches for Optimum services (offered by Cablevision, one of the most odious and crappy cable providers in the known universe) and the creepy and obviously unscreened door-to-door salesmen that Verizon is hiring to aggressively push its FIOS TV/phone service. We pay more to buy our phone, internet, and TV à la carte just because we like the way Echostar does business. Echostar CEO Charlie Ergen is the kind of cult hero to the company's customers the way Steve Jobs is for Apple's. I like the company so much that I bought some of the stock for my IRA. And I like the service offered so much that I would rather have a lower stock price than see the company sold to AT&T, which was widely expected earlier this month and still may happen given the company's splitting into two entities -- Echostar retaining the set-top box/satellite businesses and Dish Network Corp. offering the subscription service.

Alas, I expect the subscription service to be sold to AT&T sometime next year anyway given this move, which will create a huge moral dilemma for whatever remains of our eighteen-month commitment at that point. Somehow I can't imagine that an AT&T-owned Dish Network is going to keep channels like Free Speech Television, Worldlink, and Veria. But in the world of premium television, it's pick your poison. And eventually, given the FCC's determination to consolidate the media into ever fewer hands, it won't matter anyway. All you'll hear anywhere is what the government wants you to.