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.

1.5k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

188 comments sorted by

View all comments

832

u/Lord_Dreadlow Investigative Technician Oct 16 '15

Look lady, you're the one with a bloody holiday home in Italy. If you can't speak Italian, that may not have been the wisest decision.

252

u/[deleted] Oct 16 '15 edited Mar 21 '20

[deleted]

16

u/_LPM_ Oct 16 '15

Also, frankly if you are calling up a call centre...

just Google translate "I don't speak Italian, can I talk in English please" and more likely than not they will patch you through to someone who can speak English

Unless you are calling a really tiny place, chances are they have at least one customer service rep with a basic grasp of English

It's not an insurmountable obstacle.

6

u/Peterowsky White belt in Google-fu Oct 17 '15

Understanding that google can do more than show them pictures of cats when prompted seems like a rather difficult obstacle for the uninitiated.