Most pathetic complaint ever!

[AdminAssistant]

I had to call Dell's tech support due to some battery issues, and my call was taken by a lovely lady in India. By lovely, I do mean 'lovely'. She had an accent, but she spoke slowly, repeated herself when I asked, and was by all means very pleasant. Then, she said her supervisor wanted to speak to me. This guy, now, had an accent thick as rice pudding. Could not understand a word. I think I finally just said, "Your rep is doing a fantastic job" He thanked me and life moved on.

One of my KC friends was from Philly. I don't know how many times I had to tell him to SLOW DOWN because I couldn't make out what he was saying. City people.

[PepperElf]

not sure if it was cos i was in virginia or because i was using a verizon cell... but I usually got a Stephen Hawkings voice.

I only got humans if the computer didn't understand me.

[mharbourgirl]

Middle-eastern accents can be very sexay, actually. Complaining woman has neither taste nor class.

Heh. This just reminded me of a show I was watching last night (Really Big Things on the Discovery Channel, the host is a big ol' goofy bear of a guy). He was talking to a project manager in the UAE about this ginormous tower they were building. Anyway, said project manager was Chinese...and apparently had learned his English in Sydney, or at least had Australian-born teachers. His accent was absolutely delicious.

I love listening to accents and trying to guess where people are from, or at least where they learned English from, before I have to ask. Often I guess right and then I'm happy as a clam.

[SpyOne]

Once upon a time, one of the things a person did when training to become a news broadcaster (radio or television) was to hire a vocal coach to train you how to speak like a person from Iowa. The reason for this was that surveys consistantly showed that the accent of people from Iowa was easilly understood by most of the English-speaking world, and had the fewest instances of people not being able to understand it. Effectively, Iowa was the only place in the world that didn't have an accent, and so it was the "standard".

About 20 years ago I bought a book published in England that consisted mainly of criticism of the news media. One of the things I specificly recall was a comment that a news presenter needs to be understandable to the majority of the audience, followed by a rant to the effect of, "So why the hell is everyone hiring weathermen from Scotland!?"

I mention these things because, even more than the news, providing information over the phone requires a speaking voice and accent (or lack thereof) that are clearly understandable, even given a poor microphone and a transmission system that tends to drop certain frequencies and add buzz to others. It also requires that the person be able to easilly understand the caller, which is going to be a region-by-region thing.

My internet company has apparently outsourced most of it's customer service work: any time I talk to a human there he inevitably gives me a name like "Kevin", but pronunces it like a bad extra from an Indiana Jones movie. I've known people from Iran and Pakistan who had significanly less of an accent than "Kevin". People with names like Daryoosh and Amernath.
I'm not biased against "Kevin". I applaud his finding a good paying job. I applaud his finding a way to funnel American Dollars into his pockets. None of this changes the fact that I cannot understand him most of the time he speaks.
"I'm sorry, but I have partial hearing loss and have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing sounds in the presence of background noise. Usually when speaking with someone on the phone, I have to guess at what they said about one-in-three words. Add to that your non-standard pronunciation of your vowels, and I simply cannot understand you. I'll be handling this on the website."

So, I can totally get somebody calling their 411 provider to complain that, while I'm all in favor of outsourcing such jobs to developing nations in southern Asia, you really need to hire people whose accent isn't impenetrable.

[wanderingjoe72]

Wow, I just ran into this the other day. Our company is one of the one that has sent tons of jobs overseas to save money. So I get lots of customer complaints.

One lady did make the point that she was hard of hearing and most accents made it impossible for her to understand people over the phone. Unfortunately I had no way to get her to a US rep. I know the reason is if word got out, SCs would just call and claim to be hard of hearing so they could get a US rep.

We even have some Indian people that work in our center and they had to get a coworker on the phone to prove they weren't in India. Not sure what difference it would have made, but SCs will always be Scs.

[bloodrose]

Oh dear, I hope I don't know this woman! I worked with one just like her. I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area which has just about every type of accent you can imagine. She had no problem with the English accents. But...whenever someone called with an asian accent, she was super bitchy and all "I can't understand you!" and in a rush to hang up. After the call, she'd fume and look at me and my coworkers as if we were going to give her sympathy. Hells no, lady. She would say the most flippantly racist stuff, too. I can't believe she wasn't fired.