I had a funny/weird experience with tech support today (Symantic Norton Antivirus)

Anway, I had to call 3 different times, and I ended up speaking to about 6 different agents. They were all obviously from India, but they all had such "American" sounding names like "John", "Peggy", "Alice" and "Dave".

These are obviously not their real names...but I think the reason Symantic re-baptised them is that the average middle American would be scared off if they heard names like "Rajvinder" or "Arun" or "Baljit".

I felt bad for them...it must be humiliating having to hide your real name.

wow that's awful.

The company may have done it to make people think before shouting, "PUT ME ON THE PHONE WITH SOMEONE WHO SPEAKS FUCKING ENGLISH!" Everyone I know who works in a call center deals with that now.

But really, it is humiliating for a company to do that.

That's why it pays to have friends in IT.

I mean this in as non-racist a manner as possible, but I find it incredible that so many companies move their call centre operations overseas to any (largely) non-English-speaking country. Don't get me wrong, if it improves the standard of living for those people, I do find it hard to object. What concerns me is that the call centres are always for customer service purposes and you'd think that any company would be interested in having the most well-spoken people manning the phones as possible (I suppose that probably rules out half the UK population as well).

Even regional differences in accent here in the UK can be difficult. I've heard about English customers' calls going through to Scottish operators, and even that can prove a challenge for both parties. It can't be easy for an Asian operator to deal with a British customer, and vice-versa.

Am I the only person that thinks this way? You're paying people to speak to your customers, wouldn't you want the most capable people for that job?


But yeah, it's incredible that they'd have their Asian operators be known as western names. I wonder how many Asian operators' lives were made a misery by ignorant customers before the people at the top reached that solution. And it's likely still a fairly miserable job when you can't even be addressed by your own name. It blows my mind.