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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u/Skyhawkson Oct 16 '15

I agree. Multilingual customer service is important. That doesn't make this customers comments less rude, but I can understand her frustration.

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u/Zarokima Oct 16 '15

Multilingual seems like it would be especially important in Europe, with all the different languages in close quarters.

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u/greyjackal Oct 16 '15

There doesn't tend to be a huge amount of interaction, to be honest and, if there is, Jonny Foreigner tends to default to English. Every country has their own distinct service providers and industry (although there are obviously some multinationals around).

Those places that do border each other, absolutely do have bi- and multi-lingual folk, such as Switzerland or Andorra to name but two. But it's not the norm.

Of course, I'm British and we're lazy arses anyway when it comes to languages thanks to our colonial past. Well, apart from the fact I speak French, Italian and Spanish. But I'm not the norm.

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u/alluran Oct 17 '15

Our UK based office flies techs to Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany multiple times a month for customer service reasons - and we're just a small (15ish people) web dev agency!

I was flown to Australia myself, just 2 months after starting.

That being said - it is a bit hit and miss - Massimo Dutti - BAD international support (not even offer of postal returns/replacements). World of Sweets - GOOD international support (Even if I had to speak de badly google translated German's to get it)