Call Centres...

wontfallforit

Chances are, if a company has callcentres based in the UK and overseas, and their "Indian" centres are rubbish, then their UK centres are unlikely to be much better either.

Aside from the language barrier (which has never caused me any problems), you should expect to get exactly the same level of service offshore, as you expect onshore. Often, overseas staff are trained to exactly the same standard, usually have a good level of account authority (banks in particular have seamless information-sharing across sites), and are also sometimes trained by UK staff.

A company with a poor overseas callcentre is a bad company overall. Likewise, I've dealt with a number of UK-based callcentres that have been rubbish. Aviva Life & Pensions springs to mind. Lovely staff, no attitude issues whatsoever, but I do sometimes get the sense that the advisers are bumbling about a bit

Kilty_2

paulboy83 wrote: »

Nationwide have UK call centres, but when I had to deal with them a few months back when some !!!! committed fraud with my account details they were poor. The staff were rude, hard to get any information out of and couldnt wait to get me off the phone.

I had the exact opposite experience with their Credit Card department in similar circumstances (suspected fraud, turned out a company I'd paid £600 to had decided to charge me twice :T)

Couldn't have been happier with the way they handled my concern.

Kilty_2

JacksterD wrote: »

O2 has call centres in Leeds and Glasgow as far as I know. I think Leeds might be for mobile related calls and Glasgow for broadband calls.

Glasgow's a big mobile site too - for contract customers only though no prepay. Was the sole iPhone support when I worked for them too.

There's also one in Bury and two outsourced ones in Preston Brook and Manchester (don't get me started on those :rotfl:)

vaporate

Wutang wrote: »

Says the BNP supporter!!

Why aren't there any clever racists?[/QUOTE]


I vote for who I like. You're the dumb tit here.

lol Not clever? based on what? Weird creature.

Sucker_for_sweeties

al25 wrote: »

I find the scottish call centres more difficult to understand than the Indian call centres.
Some of them have really strong accents.

Mmmm definately...ah ken whit yeh mean..........but I bet they (we....me sometimes ..sky,adobe,tiscali.conde nast and manpower , all a few years ago) understood you pretty well, and really tried to help.

I hope:o

BT just really take the poor call handling crown.

Soemone somewhere on the thread mentioned the real issue....the call handler not being empowered enough to resolve it.

Sky were good like that (years ago, don't know now), agents had a good bit of leeway, and we never had many real disasters

JuicyJesus

First Direct's call centres are great. HSBC's offshore ones are good, I can usually understand what the people on the other end are saying, and they tend to get everything done on the odd occasion that I need to contact them. Their sales department is entirely UK-based too.

I personally like Portsmouth Water - similar to First Direct, they give you a geographical number to call, you get through to a person within a few rings and they're very efficient and friendly. Hats off to them.