SevenCubed - 7:07 pm on Jan 29, 2013 (gmt 0)

Oh here's a tip of the day!

If you ever find yourself struggling with an issue that you think is going to be complicated and you want some advanced support consider this:

If you call into a centre that offers bilingual support, and you speak English, do not choose help in English. Press the other language option, more times than not the tech person is fully qualified in English and sitting in North America. If you select English as your choice you get transferred offshore. From there just apologize and fake your way through it saying you must have pressed the wrong button. More often than not the person will help you in English. It was always the directive we received on how to handle "wrong routing". (Ha, I'm sticking it back to the man, I never had to sign any non-disclosure concerning this so now you know).

But I want to quantify something here. I'm not saying that offshore help is less qualified even though in many cases that's true.

What the real problem is, based on what was explained to me by management in various places I've been in is rather funny.

When these jobs arrive and employ individuals in less fortunate regions the money paid to those people is rather large by their standards of living whereas we would consider it less than acceptable. What happens (I'm told) is that the workers enjoying this new found wealth tend to not show up for work a lot as they go out and enjoy spending it. They live by a different culture where work is secondary.

So they end up with under-staffed call centres. Often times the bilingual centre I was in would have to handle the English queue overflow. Or they fill the empty seats offshore with talking heads that are very unqualified.