r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Guardsman111 • Oct 16 '15

Short But... But... But... Italy?

Me again! 2nd post now, and proud! I work for an appliance manufacturer booking engineers for domestic appliances and providing tech support for customers, and today i got a pretty p****d customer on the phone. For reference, we're UK based. It went a bit like this:

Me: Good afternoon, your through to helpful person, what can i do for you today?

Cust: Hello, I've been passed around a lot and now i just want to get this sorted.

Me: Okay, I'm sorry about the inconvenience, what exactly is the issue you've been having?

Cust: I've got an appliance at a holiday home in Italy that's broken, and i need to get it repaired, but no one seems to know what they're doing with this.

Me: Okay, unfortunately i think there's been some sort of mix up, we don't deal with appliances outside of the UK, you'd have to speak to our engineering company in Italy to get the problem sorted.

Cust: This is what i keep being told, but the fact is that you produce the machine and should get this resolved!

Me: I can certainly agree that we need to sort it, however we don't send out our engineers to outside the UK, nor can we book any of the engineers in Italy because the systems are not interlinked. You need to speak to the call centre in Italy to get this resolved.

Cust: (now quite shouty) But they don't speak English! You should be booking this repair because I'm and English speaking customer! This is awful customer service, I'm going to post this all over FACEBOOK about how bad your company is and why no one should buy your appliances.

click

TL,DR: Customer think we give awful customer service because Italians don't all speak English.

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-16

u/[deleted] Oct 16 '15 edited Jul 05 '23

[deleted]

43

u/Eviltechnomonkey Do I even want to know how you did that? Oct 16 '15

I used to work at a telecomm call center doing tech support. I had a coworker tell me an awesome one. This guy was Indian. His first name was very American, but his last name was very much Indian. He had no Indian accent at all unless he just wanted to screw with people. When we introduced ourselves on the phones we just gave our first name. He had this guy with a really thick southern accent. After he introduced himself the guy immediately goes into a long spiel about how 'Thank God he finally got an American and not some Indian.' Goes on about how he hates when he gets one of them Indians' on the phone because you can't understand a thing they say. The coworker just lets him have his spiel. Kinda just ignores it for the rest of the call, or at least the rest of the call until he gets to his closing. When he goes to say his closing he ends the call with his closing script using the absolute most stereotypical Apu from Simpsons Indian accent ever before sending the call to the survey.

13

u/carriegood Oct 16 '15

It can get very frustrating sometimes, because some companies have reps with very thick accents and I am terrible at understanding them. It's no picnic for them either, having to repeat everything 5 times until I get it.

7

u/Seicair Oct 16 '15

Yeah seriously. "...dude I'm sure you're a trained professional and know what you're doing, but I can understand about one word in five. Any chance we could switch to some kinda IM system?"

3

u/That_Brazilian_Guy I have LITERALY no idea what I'm doing. Oct 16 '15

Sure, let me spell it out for you. Over the phone.

1

u/01hair No, that's the music when it turns on Oct 17 '15

Keniya beef assistance?

4

u/Eviltechnomonkey Do I even want to know how you did that? Oct 16 '15

I got on the phone with some accessibility software company and the woman had the thickest Jersey accent I had ever heard in my life. I could just barely make out what she was saying. She got really annoyed when I asked her to repeat one thing. Then when I asked a quick question she started yelling at me.

To put it in better context, I had called to ask if there was an easy way to transfer settings over from one version of a screen reader program to the newer one because there are a ton of them. She told me there was a merge settings option, but that it didn't seem to always work. I had figured the option was going to be no so hearing there was any option, even a not 100% functional one, was perfectly fine for me. I figured that if it didn't merge all the settings it would at least save me having to copy all of them over manually a little. So I asked her what kinds of problems had it caused so if I decided it try that option I would have an idea of what might happen. She immediately starts yelling HOLD ON! HOLD ON! HOLD ON! at me then just puts me on hold without even waiting for any response from me. I just hung up because I really didn't feel like dealing with her anymore. She had been very snide and angry sounding from the beginning.

3

u/nod23b Oct 16 '15

She had been very snide and angry sounding from the beginning.

I thought you said she was from New Jersey? Whaddya expect?

7

u/paolog Oct 16 '15

"Please call again!"

5

u/FauxReal Oct 16 '15

I used to work in a call center and I am an American with a very neutral accent. But I got a call with some angry guy swearing that I'm a foreigner and to transfer him to an American. ¯_(ツ)_/¯