Foreign Accents at Call Centers

[Snagglefoot]

Anytime you get a call from someone with an India accent it's a scam call anyway. Just hang up.

That pretty much takes out all the financial advisors at RBC in Canada.

 

[y_p_w]

We have an engineering center in Indian - these are super smart and hard working people that still know math and science …
They can be hard to understand - sometimes I ask them to summarize in an email - often that comes back with attachments and references …
Fact is our schools are not keeping up with the high GPA’s we need …

Having worked in the engineering field for a while, it gets interesting. There were a lot of teaching and lab assistants from India. I went to a grad school where one instructor was from India. IIT grad up his Ph.d and a researcher at HP Labs (their premier research lab). Really sharp guy. Really nice and easy to understand. A lot of people from India who work in technical and science fields working overseas have adopted a clearer accent with better grammar. However, a lot of people in India don’t really have to improve their English, and it can get frustrating. I worked with a company office in Singapore and it got interesting with a mix of coworkers who were ethnic Chinese and Indian. That Singapore Chinese accent could be interesting although they spoke English well since that was their primary army language in high school.

Heck - I remember being invited to attend a Catholic Church service once where the pastor was from India and had a thick accent. But his grammar was impeccable.

 

[y_p_w]

There is the stereotype of the scam call center in India. But to some degree it’s real. I still don’t get how anyone can believe that it’s the IRS or US law enforcement, although the was call centers work, a tech company is more believable.

I suppose the scam that’s shown on YouTube the most is the refund scam where the victim agrees to allow Remote Desktop software to be installed and then fiddles with HTML to make it look like there’s been an excessive refund, or possibly just use that access to transfer money between accounts and then point to the additional money in one account as a mistaken excess refund. Then ask for that to be returned in cash to a money mule, wire transfer to Thailand, or just gift cards where the numbers can be resold.

 

[Jdeere562]

Op, did you not get your answer when you posted this same topic about three weeks ago….? I’m old and hard of hearing as well but….

Say what? Forgot to mention...I'm forgetful too!

 

[ammolab]

The accent can be bad, but as often the equipment is an additional factor. They obviously have a headset with a boom microphone that is crappy or no where near their mouth. Volume and efficiency is inadequate.