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Originally Posted by horseman
Actually quite the opposite - Clearly my banal attempt at humour/wit/banter falls flat. More smilies needed.
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Mea cupla, I have misread your comments entirely, I do apologise
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Originally Posted by horseman
Didn't appreciate how serious you took your past employment with VM.  |
Hmm, I'm not sure if "taking it seriously" is the best way to describe it. I like to think I was one of the better agents, at least from a technical perspective (I always got stuff done, though I'm sure my phone manner could use work). I suppose I must have been to get moved to outage so quickly, but I seen a lot of things that left me...somewhat deflated. I did the job to the best of my ability, but I cannot say the same for many of my colleagues - both onshore and offshore. I had to clean up numerous problems that were caused by agents not doing their job correctly and seen plenty of "repeats" coming back in on a daily basis.
I am not surprised, though. I seen the training those agents were given, it was minimal with a mantra of "you'll pick it up as you go along". I have had conversations with agents that barely knew what planet we were on (But had lovely telephone manner, of course!) and cleaned up their messes as well.
At the same time, I have also been screamed at by customers for things that were genuinely unavoidable or out of our control. I have been a customer in both positions, having had an agent not have a clue and being part of an outage that couldn't be easily avoided. I am happy to give leeway in the latter case, but the former makes my blood boil.
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Originally Posted by horseman
If some one said my 30yrs with IBM explains why I'm so arrogant and conceited I'd have to agree with them and share a few company jokes about it as well!
Horses for courses - so sorry again. Let's continue via PM if my public apology offered is still insufficient?
I don't deny there are failings/differences in agent tech quality in UK either nor that offshore has imo shown a small but noticeable incremental improvement in the last 6 years. However in my experience (in general) UK Level1 are far less reticent at admitting their technical limitations and thus more willing to escalate/transfer to Level2.
Equally there are more Level1 agents that are not limited by the "traffic light" system of their noddy "Network stats" interface but able to explore further than their offshore counterparts.
Yes I sometimes have problems with UK Regional accents and I'm always apologising for my lack of comprehension but almost to an agent we have a laugh about it including regional weather comparisons whatever!
Offshore are so polite and always profusely apologising for the wait when invariably addressing my questions to a colleague/senior that it becomes wearing. Any attempt to inject humour to lighten & slow their rapid scripted dialogue of excuses falls completely flat. Just like UK there are some (but all to rare) that do know their onions but too far between compared to UK.
That's the price/compromise of sourcing off-shore with a far lower Labour & Burden Rate than UK! If we were all prepared to pay the increased subscription rate for UK quality support then this type of discussion would largely disappear.
That said no way is a Consumer product Level1 support going to attract quality staff as my only experience was with IBM Level1 in Spango Valley Greenock which were excellent (but funded by Corporate Maintenance fees) but still required some occasional feed back/exchange from us in Level2/2.5 at IBM Basingstoke.
The remuneration/mindset was thus not comparable to VM's it seems! |
I have no doubt in my mind that the quality of offshore is far lower than that of onshore. There's also a lot more of them, so your chances of getting a rubbish agent are higher with offshore as well - which doesn't help. My only point was that I have personally had the same issues with onshore agents as well, while I've also had great support from offshore on occasion - as you say, horses for courses. Pot luck if you get a competent agent and just hanging up on the offshore lot guarantees you nothing, it just makes their jobs harder.
They are people as well, which some people forget. I have heard (sadly) some horribly racist things from customers who have got through to me, things like (And I quote) "Thank **** you're English, sick of talking to Pakis". Literally everything in that sentence is wrong (I'm Irish and offshore is in India...) and I can only imagine the attitudes offshore must face when they get people like that, but ignorance aside they get paid **** all, they have worse training than onshore (Which is bad), they get constant abuse (even from within the company, there's a reason they don't like escalating to Second line and it's not just over-confidence), they are monitored to ridiculous levels (Which is why they seem to be following a "script" - they're not, but if they veer even slightly off what they've been told to do, they can get in trouble) and all in all it's a pretty bum deal they have got.
As I mentioned earlier, I have low tolerance for people that don't do their job correctly and I hold that same tolerance to offshore as well, but I wouldn't completely write them off, nor would I assume that onshore have a better clue what they're doing either. It's luck of the draw either way