to impersonate people from Britain, America, Australia etc over the phone.

[tzfujimino]

Tufguy, you usually have errors in your posts. But if you wrote like that all the time you wouldn't need any help.

I agree.
I'm very surprised to read post #19!

 

[teechar]

Do you make fun of these kinds of people?

No, and I think that would be deplorable under any circumstances. No one has the right to make fun of people because of the way they speak. If anyone does that, they're the fool themselves!
I've also had difficulty on occasion understanding people from international call centres, but I've never considered abusing them or making fun of them in any way! All it ever takes is for me to ask them to repeat what they said or to speak a bit more slowly.
I've heard that those operators often have to deal with customers in Western countries who consider them stupid or inferior, and that's probably why they try and emulate certain accents or chit chat about current topics. I empathize with the call centre people, not with the rude and condescending customers they have to deal with.

 

[emsr2d2]

I feel sorry for the people in those call centres. They're simply doing the job they've been given. In my opinion, the blame lies with companies who want to export their call centres to countries where they can pay a paltry amount in wages and who give the call centre staff rigid, useless scripts from which they are not allowed to deviate.
I have been driven to distraction during calls to such call centres but I really try not to take it out on the person on the other end of the phone because I'm aware that there is nothing they can really do - if they deviate from the script, they could lose pay or even lose their job. However, I can assure you that there is little more frustrating than someone repeatedly saying "I am very sorry that you are having problems with your computer/washing machine/mobile phone, Miss [surname], in response to everything I say. They appear to be ordered to keep talking, no matter what. I'd rather have 30 seconds of silence if I thought the person was genuinely working to try to fix my problem.

I have heard of train companies in the UK moving their call centres to other countries with somewhat disastrous results. There are stories of people telephoning to ask for times and fares for a relatively simple journey between two stations that are perhaps 20 miles apart, and being give a route that takes them over 200 miles out of their way and costs 5 times as much as the actual fare. The problem seems to be that the person in the call centre has absolutely no idea of the geography of the UK so it's easy for them to not realise that the route and cost involved couldn't possibly relate to the two stations in question (and of course they can mishear or misspell stations they've never heard of), resulting in totally inaccurate results.

As the others have said, the people in Indian call centres don't "impersonate" people from the UK, America etc. Their accents and sometimes even the noises in the background of a call give them away immediately. However, they certainly are told to use (or are given) very English-sounding names to use. We are not fooled.

 

[tufguy]

Tufguy, you usually have errors in your posts. But if you wrote like that all the time you wouldn't need any help. (There a couple of places where I would have used exclamation marks, but that's a minor thing.) However, you should know that the opinions you expressed will offend a lot of people.

But this is what the reality is.

 

[teechar]

Hear, hear. If we had a third approval button on the forum, I would have clicked it for Piscean's post above. And had others not already replied to tufguy's post #19, I would have swiftly wiped it off the face of this forum.

 

[tzfujimino]

If we had a third approval button on the forum, I would have clicked it for Piscean's post above.

How about a "Love" button with a red heart next to it?

 

[teechar]

How about a "Love" button with a red heart next to it?

That's a good one for Red5 to think about. :up: