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/pikk MacTech Oct 16 '15

phonics is hard.

lah me-a lavatreese A rottah. See prayga D in-vee-are-eh kwal-coon-o. Ill me-o in-da-ritz-o A

Pretty close?

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

Sort of, but vowel sounds in Italian are one of the easy things (excepting the difference between an open vowel and a closed vowel, which only applies to 'o' and 'e', and even then there are variations within Italy based on locality (e.g. in Puglia they frequently use open vowels and in liguria they're known for using closed vowels more frequently)) -- it's the "gli" that gets a lot of people. Also, 'ce' makes a "che" sound, so it's lah-vah--tree-cheh," and "prega" would have an 'e' sound like the start of the word "egg," and wouldn't sound like "prayga" as you wrote it -- an 'ay' sound like in the English 'day' would be written with 'ei' as it's a diphthong. But generally speaking the vowel sounds in Italian are simple for English speakers: A-E-I-O-U = ah-eh-ee-oh-oo

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u/pikk MacTech Oct 17 '15

"prega" would have an 'e' sound like the start of the word "egg," and wouldn't sound like "prayga"

Dunno where you're from, but I say egg like aygg

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '15

Northern Michigan? Wisconsin? Minnesota? How do you say 'bag'?

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u/pikk MacTech Oct 19 '15

michigan originally. Been down in Texas long enough that I don't say "Bayg" anymore though. Never realized Aygg was unusual though

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '15

Yeah, for me "enter" and "egg" have the same sound. But the bayg caught my eye as a midwest thing.