Outsourcing of call centers perturbs some

Pearl Haimowitz would like to boycott companies that outsource their customer service to India.

The Great Neck, N.Y., resident said the representatives are difficult to understand, don’t have the leeway to solve problems, and speak over poor telephone connections.

But Haimowitz, who has dealt with Indian customer service representatives working for Dell, AOL and American Express, said she thinks a boycott would be fruitless if not impossible because so many companies have sent their work abroad, where labor is cheap.

“A couple of years ago, if you talked to an American customer representative, you would find that American Express was always good at taking care of whatever it was you had a problem with,” Haimowitz said. But, she said, Indian customer service representatives “don’t have the latitude, and there is a language barrier, and they’re probably working in the middle of the night.”

While much of the criticism of outsourcing has focused on the loss of jobs in the United States, more people are complaining about poor customer service. A 2004 study of more than 600 customers by Managing Offshore-Call Center magazines found more than 60 percent had trouble understanding accents of service reps abroad, more than 40 percent said the reps couldn’t understand them, either, and half said their problem wasn’t resolved.

But some consumers say it’s possible to communicate, with a little patience. “You just have to keep asking them to repeat themselves as slowly as possible,” said Mark M. Ulrich, 21, a regional service representative at banks who deals with a call center in India to resolve problems with ATM machines. “I always end up getting it. It may take awhile. You just have to say, ‘What? Can you say that slowly?’ and have them spell it out.”

In fact, most customer service representatives abroad speak well enough to handle calls, said Chip Gliedman, who studies customer service as a vice president of Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. But some have strong accents that make communication difficult for customers, he said. “It’s a numbers game,” he said. “Just by the sheer number of calls that some of these companies get, there are going to be people that have bad experiences. And just by the sheer number of people who have bad experiences, there are going to be people who have multiple bad experiences.”

Molly Faust, a spokeswoman for American Express, said, “We have operations in dozens of countries and serve millions of customers worldwide. In addition, our customer service representatives have to meet our high customer service standards regardless of where they are located.”

According to an analysis by Giga Research, a subsidiary of Forrester Research, a foreign accent might be a problem in some cases during normal conversations and can become even worse as customers become angry.

Giga’s research also shows that Indian customer service representatives follow help-desk scripts to a fault. U.S. agents are trained to avoid repeating a customer’s questions because the practice annoys Americans, but repeating questions is natural for Indians, the Giga report says.

Gliedman said customer service abroad works well when merely conducting transactions, such as providing information to the consumer. But it doesn’t work well for building relationships.

So Dell returned its call centers for commercial business to the United States in 2003 to ensure it maintained important business relationships, Gliedman said. But the company still maintains call centers abroad, he said.

“There’s less at stake for Dell in the consumer space,” Gliedman said. “Between the buying decision, support and the next buying decision, I don’t think where a call center is located is high on the list of issues.”