Down amongst the dead men

I was doing a troll around the darker depths of the Web this morning to see what was happening in the bottom feeders blogs. I came across the TalkTalk blog purportedly written by the Boss himself, Charles Dunstone. The back numbers don't even begin to describe how things were in the outside world. No mention of the rubbish that graduated to the call centres despite the vaunted 4 weeks of training. Nothing about the deliberate lies told by these agents as to routers/modem being 'in the post' whilst those answering email and running the web page were positive there would be a six week delay.

Commenting on the call centre performance reminds me that it is not only TalkTalk that fails in this respect. I had to try dealing with the O2 use-the-word-lightly service staff. Both are somewhere off shore - maybe India. Obviously the people who sold this sort of outsourcing came up with the line that English is an official language in India. Maybe so but it is not a required language. Those who do learn, inherit the version of English used by their teacher. The rythms are all wrong - every single sentence ends with a questioning tone so that one cannot determine if being asked a question or told something. Pronunciation is weird to say the least . Peter Sellers in Goodness Gracious Me mode. That is when they speak it. They have the same problem understanding English.

I found the answer last week was to tell the agent to write down what I said and then read it. I told her she should write down the answer and if it looked good, to read it to me. She had to refer something to her manager and I directed her to write down what she had to say and we agreed this before she put me into Muzak Hell.

It seemed to work but on a call charge structure where I was paying high rates I found it very frustrating to know that my meter was running to such little benefit.

I notice Dunstone has not updated his blog since 1st September 2006. Hopefully, he is off ether whilst waiting for a broadband TalkTalk line at home. That should allow him to describe what sort of Christmas he had in his very next posting

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