[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by Raistlin

I think that I too am starting to get a better picture of the biggest problem regarding Indian call centres (I think you'll find that a lot of this can apply to British call centres as well though).

Imagine that you work in a call centre, no matter where it is located.

You are fairly new to the job, don't have a lot of exeperience either in the product or in that field. Your employers give you a script and tell you that this is a guide to the best way to solve the most recurring problems.
What do you do? You apply that guide, of course you do because you don't have the experience to do much else and because it does seem to solve the majority of problems.

As your experience increases you feel more able to apply your knowlede to the problems that you are being faced with and eventually the script becomes superfluous (sp?).

The problem with the Indian call centres (and with a lot of the British ones) is that they are still very new and therefore manned (or should that be personned) by inexperienced staff.

Given time I am sure that they will improve, unfortunately in the mean time we are left with a less than ideal situation. Perhaps the script should be re-written, a little line at the end.

Does the script ever become superfluous no matter how much experience and knowledge the agent has?

Where a script exists it should give the best method of obtaining the facts and determining subsequent action. There should be no better way of tackling the problem but if a better way is found then the script should be altered to reflect this new information.

I don't think that Indian call centres and scripts are the problem. The customer is the problem.

You have two types of customer in the main. Those that know nothing at all about the subject and those who think they have a certain amount of knowledge.

Those that know nothing may be confused by the whole subject and unable to follow the process they are being led through. If they don't get a successful conclusion to their problem they may tend to blame anything and anyone other than themselves. It is far easier to put the blame on things like "it was an Indian call centre and the bloke couldn't understand English" than their own failings.

The ones that think they have a certain amount of knowledge may or may not have the required troubleshooting knowledge and the agent they speak to doesn't know the extent of their knowledge. Even the best expert in the world can have a momentary lapse and forget a most crucial step in troubleshooting. They can get annoyed when asked to do things which are very elementary. They also can tend to jump ahead of the agent when he/she is talking them through a process and do things that the agent doesn't want them to do. How often have you been talking someone through a process that brings up a message saying "Press OK to reboot or cancel to reboot at a later time" and told them to press "cancel" only to be told they have already pressed "OK" and the sytem is rebooting?

The glaring fact that the experienced user has forgotten is that he/she has a problem that they have been unable to solve. They are obviously either doing something wrong or they don't have the necessary knowledge. The guy with the foreign accent and "the script" may be tackling the problem in the correct way which could lead to a resolution. Getting the hump and terminating the call because he is foreign or reading from a script before reaching the conclusion could be the worst thing you could have done.