[Shelbyh]

Originally Posted by MandoMan

Your first sentence is unclear, but I assume you mean the customer representatives are difficult to understand because of their accents and not that the customers are difficult to understand because of their accents. For a decade or so, many companies have contracted out this work to telephone sweat shops in India. Imagine twenty to a hundred lightly educated Indians sitting at long row as of tables in bare rooms with computers and phones in front of them. You have a hard time understanding them and yell at them, and they just have to take it. Can they understand your accent? I don’t know. But chances are, all they know about the product giving you trouble is the guide on the computer. They have probably never seen the item.

But it’s not just India. I remember a decade ago needing to ask questions of a real person in the IRS. A lot of the people answering IRS customer assistance phones at the lowest level are in Philadelphia, and they often have strong African-American accents that are nearly as difficult to understand as English spoken by less-well-educated reps in India. They also tend not to know much about tax questions. If your question is too difficult, they send you eventually to a supervisor who may be of any ethnicity (I don’t care) but speak standard, understandable English.

And then there are the horrible phone answering systems proliferating, and now there are computers that “chat” with us but really just waste out time. If we ever do reach a real person, chances are we will have to be transferred, be put on hold again, and the call will be lost. The worst offender I’ve come across recently is Verizon Prepaid. After hours of trying to reach a person, over several days, I finally went to the company-owned Verizon store on 441 (the others in the area are all franchises that are limited in their ability to help you) and canceled my prepaid Verizon contract and got a regular Verizon plan.

I remember 20 to 40 years ago buying a lot of the family clothes at Lands End and L.L. Bean. They both had outstanding phone reps. The spoke standard English. They seemed educated and interesting and sympathetic and knowledgable. Every order was done right and every question was answered. I wanted them all to become my good friends. Those were the days! But they lived in Dodgeville, Wisconsin or Freeport, Maine, where there are Americans who speak standard American English.

If the government sincerely wants to make America great, it should make it a criminal offense for companies to not have customer reps who speak good English and live in the U.S.and know what they are talking about and are easy to reach. Long times on hold should be a criminal offense that leads to automatic reimbursement to the customer, as with planes that leave late or overbook. All companies should be required to have easy to reach real people to answer questions. (Ever tried to reach a real person at Amazon or eBay? Not going to happen!) Companies are allowed to waste millions of hours of our time every year without recompense. People, this is why we need a strong Consumer Protection Bureau. Don’t think of it as government waste stymying business profits. Think of it as helping YOU get what you need in a timely manner,

Don’t think the answer is another government agency or expanding one already in place.