Originally Posted by
Paralytic
BA's offshore call centre may be bad, but they are not alone.
I've had horrendous experiences with:
- BT: Being told engineers would visit and they didn't turn up. Engineer visits cancelled without me being told. Orders being cancelled without me being told. Call-backs not happening, notes not being gupdated, mis-information provided, lack of ownership
- SKY: Having to go through a process to diagnose a fault even though I'd already done that, and ending up saying, "ok, done that" multiple times, whilst sitting doing nothing, so i could then speak to their tier 2 team
- O2: I was cancelling a service beyond the contract period and the agent said he had to speak to his supervisor. He came back and said "Ok, I've spoken to my manager and we're going to let you cancel". It took all my might not to scream at him, but went for the path of least resistance.
Its the way of the world now; unless you're important to a company (GGL/Prem in BA's case), you'll be fortunate to get beyond barely acceptable service. Its the price we pay for the prices we want to pay.
I find it interesting that British companies still rely on outsourcing so heavily to geographies with historically thicker accents. There was a wave of this 10-15 years ago in the US but most American companies I have encountered have pulled back from India and if offshore, use locations where the standard English accent is far far more clear to (American) ears. I can't think of a single interaction in the past 2 years that's gone to somewhere I knew was offshore, whereas in the UK I'd guess 75% of my customer service queries are punted offshore (to usually terrible result).