Why can't overseas call centers do more to embrace customer service?

You're already feeling your blood pressure soar as you listen to the same few bars of the same synthesized on-hold phone music so many times, it’s bored into your brain.

Finally, after 15, 20, maybe even 30 minutes, a real person answers. But your fleeting relief turns to grief because you can’t quite understand the person who you think says his name is Calvin. In fact, that person has an accent that’s so stilted, you can’t really understand most of what he says. So for the first of several times you ask him to repeat himself.

To make this frustrating, all-too-common situation worse, you’re not calling the business to order a shirt or jeans. You’re calling for desperately needed medical supplies for yourself or a loved one with diabetes — medical supplies that track blood sugar levels and deliver the insulin you need to stay alive.

When “Calvin” says those supplies have shipped, you want to jump for joy — until you ask when they were sent, and “Calvin” says he can’t tell you a date, only that they’ve shipped.

When you ask to speak with a supervisor (who you’re hoping speaks better English), “Calvin” says he isn’t able to connect you.

So you go to the company’s web site, which seems like an obstacle course to navigate, and fire off a message of complaint — hoping it’s read by a real, not an artificial — person. When you finally get a call back, you learn that the shipment of medical supplies Calvin was referring to was shipped in January — not the new shipment of supplies you need.

Welcome to the maddening world of overseas call answering centers. If you think you’re always trying to deal with them, you’re right. Hundreds, “if not thousands” of U.S. companies, from AT&T and Google to Verizon and Wal-Mart, use overseas call centers in countries like the Philippines and India, according to Jack Boyd, whose Boyd Company helps find locations for call centers. In fact, for every one call center in America, there are at least 10 overseas – which is why you’re likely to reach an overseas center.

The main reason so many are overseas isn’t necessarily the customer service we seek when we call those companies. It’s money.

The pay for overseas call center people is way cheaper in countries like India — from $6 to $9 per hour, compared to $26-$30 per hour in the U.S. — and “rising,” says Boyd. Other reasons include “low talent pools and labor shortages here in the U.S. (and) being able to service customers 24/7 without having operations open 24/7,” according to Linda Harden, the publisher of Contact Center Pipeline trade magazine.

My gripe isn’t about nativism or nationalism — although it would be great to keep as many jobs as possible in this country. This is about customer service — which is why you call these companies. If you can’t understand the person who’s supposed to help you — or they can’t even begin to help you because they’re obviously limited to a script they’re reading — that’s customer disservice.

Boyd, who understands and has experienced the maddening frustration of reaching someone who can’t answer your questions and is difficult to understand, says that negativity is why “more and more” companies are looking to open call centers in this country — often staffed by people who work not in an office, but at home. Locating a call center in a certain area can lead a business to open other parts of the business there, says Boyd.

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“Clearly, companies are hip to the frustrations,” he says, adding that “by every metric U.S. customers prefer dealing with Americans.”

But until that preference becomes a reality, we customers really have only one choice when that customer service fails.

We can switch to a company that provides better, more personalized and more responsive customer service.

Steve Israel, a longtime editor and columnist at the Times Herald-Record in Orange County, New York, can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Times Herald-Record: Frustrations with overseas call centers