Dell Support and bilingualism

[ericschand]

I had to place a call to Dell support for a product I purchased.
I got an RMA etc, and now waited for a while, no new product.

So I phoned them back. I got the India call centre.

After 10 minutes of arguing with the guy that I have already
phoned tech support, got an RMA, I just need to know where
the new product is, I grew frustrated, as he obviously didn't
understand.

So I went bilingual, and switched to Hindi. We were done in
a couple of minutes. (I need to call a centre located in
Canada, and of course, today they are closed.)

ers

[STeeLy]

My question is... Were you in India when u called... or were you in Canada and somehow got the India Dell support???

But none the less... I thought that any sort of tech support around the world would need to know English mainly because most tech comes from the States...

[Maritime Q-Scout]

Dell has customer support contracted out to India, one of my best friends just ordered a Dell laptop last week, and was talking to an Indian call centre when he phoned them.

It's very common to have centres contracted out to India, I believe AirCanada contracts out there, and United Airlines has their reservations there (mind you thier Easy Check-in Unit call centre is in beautiful Sydney NS)

[Buff]

Even though they can speak english, a language barrier can still exist. SonicWall contracts their call center out to India (or at least they used to) and I've had no problems with some people, a hard time understanding other people, and in one instance kept getting bounced around until I was directed to somebody in North America and there was no language barrier and we were able to get on the same page and solve the problem rather quickly.

[Flashpoint]

I feel your pain.

I work for a video game developer. Our publisher outsourced their QA (Quality Assurance - testing) to India.

They entered a bug saying "tire" was misspelled and should be "tyre". Technically, they weren't wrong, as "tyre" is the British version. Indian too, I guess. Overall it sucked because they were always 3 days behind us when it came to builds. By the time they reported a bug, it had usually already been fixed on our end.

Thought the spelling thing was pretty funny though.

[BlackEleven]

Originally Posted by Flashpoint

I feel your pain.

I work for a video game developer. Our publisher outsourced their QA (Quality Assurance - testing) to India.

They entered a bug saying "tire" was misspelled and should be "tyre". Technically, they weren't wrong, as "tyre" is the British version. Indian too, I guess. Overall it sucked because they were always 3 days behind us when it came to builds. By the time they reported a bug, it had usually already been fixed on our end.

Thought the spelling thing was pretty funny though.

That reminds me of an beta tester we had for our software. He logged a bug saying "centre" should be spelled "center" and "colour source" should be spelled "color source".

[Maritime Q-Scout]

reading this thread I keep thinking

"All your base are belong to us"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG7r1OGoIVg