If you live in the U.S. and have ever been surprised to hear that your call to the customer service area of a company based in the U.S., has been re-routed to India, you are just beginning to appreciate the wonderful new world of “outsourcing” of thousands of telemarketing jobs in the U.S. to other countries.

Answering the customer service line is not necessarily a highly paid job, but some companies train and recruit their people better than others.

Have you recently had an experience where you called for a basic service question and had to deal with one or more of the following:

1) Automated Voice Response Units (”the computer”) who takes you through endless options that don’t apply to you and make it almost impossible to punch through to a live human being;

2) Being put on hold for seemingly interminable amounts of time;

3) Being transferred all over the place, having to tell your story or request new again each time, only to be told it’s not their department;

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4) Always the rookie employee who doesn’t know how to do precisely the thing you are calling about and tells you to call back when their manager comes in;

5) A foreign voice with an accent so thick you can hardly understand them;

6) A U.S. voice with so much street slang and heavy regional accent or diction they might as well be speaking another language;

7) A voice at the other end so apathetic, you can tell they hate their job and can’t wait for you to end what they think is a silly or stupid call, just to give them a hard time at least in their own mind;
Just general, total incompetence across the board from someone who can’t understand your question or issue or if they do, they have no idea how to solve it so they have to pass you to someone else.

As for the Customer Service Phone help in the U.S. versus India, I go back and forth as to who I think does the better job on average. If you have an opinion on this based on experience, tell us your story and note your country.