Indian Call Centre Chaos

 Once again I have fallen foul of the curse of the Indian Call Centre ...

Call Centre Memes Are All Over The Internet .....

 ..... In this instance, its eBay and PayPal who have chosen to inflict this terror on to the British public (while probably not daring to do so with their American customers).

Last time it was Dell who put me through the wringer ... all was detailed in a post entitled "Dell Hell" and I swore I would not deal with these offshore idiots again. But, well the decades role by, and you get lulled into a false sense of security, especially as many UK firms are bringing these jobs back to the UK.

My tale this time starts innocently enough (but so does the tale of red riding hood), when I purchased an item in Euros on eBay, which had a conversion rate in Pounds Sterling shown as well. So as the Pound is mightier than the Euro, the expectation was that the total Euro purchase amount of €74.10 (item plus postage), would be converted at the PayPal daily exchange rate to Pounds, and that would appear on my credit card. 

In this instance €74.10 / £1.1181 = £63.96 - or thereabouts, was what I expected.

However when my credit card bill arrived, the amount being charged by PayPal was shown as £73.52 with no clear explanation on the PayPal page as to how they arrived at this massively greater figure.

So, I thought I would ask customer support eBay how this had happened (assuming that it was them that provided the figures). I got an immediate reply from their customer service in India (which may have been a bit disingenuous), confirming that it was PayPal that calculated the amount, and that indeed they couldn't explain it either! They gave me details on how to query it with PayPal (they are sister companies after all), and so, forgetting what this could lead to, I followed their advice and went to the PayPal message page.

Problem one .... the PayPal message page doesn't display correctly on a web browser (Firefox and Chrome latest version) ... 

Firefox And Chrome Issues PayPal Message Centre

 ... You can't read the message except one line at a time if you tab to the field. Apparently there should be a pop up displaying the message in full, with a slider on the right, but this doesn't happen.

Then if you click reply, you can only type and see one line of the reply and if you navigate away, the page often just refreshes while your not looking and wipes all the typing away .... for a major organisation this is pretty crap service. Does no one regression test their web pages or check usability issues? 

However this all works a little better in an Android Tablet and the pop up does display correctly ... however the time out and refresh wipes make using this a laborious issue. In the end I would type in notepad or an email client, then cut and paste reply into the field before it lost it, and then press send quickly. 

Having lost an hour of my life in discovering all the issues that PayPal can't be arsed fixing. I hoped that was the only problem  .... But no. I had forgotten that Indian call centre staff have 'Inglish' (Indian English), rather than English as their second tongue. This means that they more often as not fail to understand the query and either:

• Refer you to the web pages again, and again or
• Copy pages from the web page into their response, and hope that you have a good day!
  

Not one of the responders has taken ownership of the issue, so no one voice is being heard, and I have now corresponded with most of India. 

Every time I get a response, and point out the fact that its inadequate, or even completely off topic. I have had, at least two explanations of how a foreign exchange works ... this from residents of a country where cash is king, and they don't deal in travel currency .... I tried to point out to one person that as a European, I was used to exchange rates and currencies when I travelled ... pointless but better than swearing.

So now, at time of writing I am 4 - 5 days in to my query (I'll update before posting, if it resolves), with god knows how many messages sent back and forth, and so far only one of them has actually vaguely understood my issue (and denied it was PayPal, but not confirmed its eBay at fault, but at least we were in the same ball park) ... however, after replying to him, I got another of the idiots replying, and another explanation of foreign exchanges. So it was one step forward and three steps back.

I suspect that although I don't want to, I may have to formally complain to the Ombudsman, just to get the simple explanation of who decided the Euro figure that was converted, that was all I requested in the first place. I have just had another two messages of incomprehension from India .... one of them entitled "How was PayPal" ...'We'd like to know how you feel about our customer service....' .... I told them! 😠

It actually makes you want to break down in rage, but that's the beauty of this system for the companies, there is no one to rage at, so they can ignore the hate. India, the Philippines and other non-European countries that host 'European customer service centres' have a very different cultural attitude to what that term means. They often have a pass the buck mentality, which means no one will take ownership, especially when the problem refuses to just go away ...

The moral of all this is that when major companies try to save a few pounds or dollars by sending 'Customer Service' to a country where the very concept is alien, then they are no longer providing customer service but are very pointedly putting two fingers up in your faces. Any non straight forward  query will not get dealt with properly, and will simply go back and forth with no one addressing it in the hope that:

• The complainant will simply give up.
• Someone else will resolve the matter.

It should be illegal to offshore these services to countries that are culturally so different. 

In my last torment by Indian call centre staff a decade ago, I finally emailed Dell in the USA, and got given an email of an Irish customer service advisor (Dell had to use Irish offshore for the Americans who refused to deal with Indians), who dealt with my issue in less than 10 minutes, and even compensated me for all my troubles .... Result ... eventually.

I somehow suspect that won't happen this time .... I still don't know if this is a case of eBay passing a larger Euro figure to PayPal (who are therefore actually innocent), than I was being shown on the transaction page, or its a mistake by PayPal. These two companies bring this sort of public relations issues on their own heads by using these offshore services who can't fix anything.

But lets not just claim that UK based offices, means always getting good customer service. Not so long ago, I had cause to complain to Argos, and finding no obvious web method, I decided to write an old fashioned letter to their UK head office .... four months later I haven't even had an acknowledgement, let alone a reply. 

Some companies like to say that our custom is valued, but actually simply don't give a crap about us.