Or perhaps you treat the customer support workers as humans instead of worker drones and give them the agency to terminate the call when they are getting abused, with the contracts of repeat offenders getting terminated?

> On the other, too many customers are complete racist dicks to people who they perceive as not "belonging to their country"

nunez alluded to the reason why people will do that. And no, it's not racist in the way you're trying to frame it.

The callers are angry that they're being forced to talk with people which don't even speak their language well enough for it to be a non-issue. Despite being paying customers.

Because the company had a genius MBA which wanted a bigger bonus, so they outsourced/offshored it.

These workers may not deserve this treatment, but it's completely understandable - and the foreign workers ARE the representative of the company doing this shit. And thus... Framing this behavior as racism will not help your message whatsoever.

Not sure why you're being downvoted but this is the truth if you live in a western country (probably other countries too but I have never lived outside of a non-Western country).

> The other issue is that this further incentivizes companies to off-shore their support

Why is this a problem? Why are we so attached to the notion that a role must be completed from a specific jurisdiction (outside of regulatory). If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?

Plenty of small companies offshore early support, to reduce costs. In many cases this provides jobs in economies that otherwise doesn't have them, and can lead to a tech industry that in turn hires globally. There are several economies that received a boost this way, and now benefit.

I don't see the problem. Yes, there may be uncomfortable shuffling of roles, layoffs,etc. But, as a believer in globalization, this will just happen. Yes, it will impact me as well.

I suspect the main culprit here is company policy/choice resulting in angry callers. Not to say there aren't other factors, but people generally don't call companies because they're having a good time. If Telus is anything like American TV/phone/internet companies, then I'm even more convinced of this.

edit: And if people are able to detect this and suspect they're not even talking to a human at all, it might even make verbal abuse more common.

Something seems very wrong with observing that people are shitty and terrible to each other and proposing interposing a machine between them to make communication bearable.

>Singaporeans hate Australian accents more than anyone over here hates indian accents.

No way, I've never heard of this before.

Does anyone know why this is? Do they have a bad experience with Australian colleagues? Do we harrass them in public the way that the British backpackers do here?

I’ve spent time in India, and while they have many of the same things, they sometimes operate very differently. I assume call centers don’t pay that much, so it’s very possible that while India has certain things, the people I’m talking to have limited access.

If I’m trying to convey an issue about a flight, per your example, it may very well be to someone who’s never flown or has very different expectations for what it looks like to fly. At one of the airports I was at in India, I was trying to find my gate and was pointed to a guy at a card table with a 3-ring binder, where he flipped through to find the flight. This was maybe 10 years ago; I had never experienced anything like that in the US, even going back several decades. This is a cultural and experiential difference. If someone from that airport in India called me for help (prior to that experience), I would have had an really hard time parsing their problem, as I wouldn’t have any context for seeing a man with a binder about finding gate information. Someone saying that wouldn’t have made any sense to me. Other airports there were more akin to what I’m used to in the US, but still had their local quirks.

This same type of issue could play out regardless of the country. India was the example brought up, but I’ve run into confusion due to cultural differences everywhere I’ve been to some degree. How impactful this is to support will vary based on how common the issue is, but I’m usually not calling support for common issues now that most of those can be handled via a website.

it all depends on their training. And with the churn i imagine they are getting, or the cost measures, it's usually not quite the same.

And yes, cultural difference matters. Americans often have more agency to take initiative, on average. Knowing there's an American on the other side puts me at ease, mentally.

I did not use AI for the comment. AI usually does that at the start of a paragraph, not the end. I tacked it on the end to better clarify my actual point, as it required reading between the lines too much, which can be problematic on a forum.

> It's not X, it's Y = AI pattern.

Yeah, a human has never used this pattern before! Good thing AI always leaves this digital signature which is never wrong, so you always know if the person on the other end has used AI.

FFS enough with these goddamn witch-hunt anti-shibboleths. It is neither reliable nor clever nor funny.

—Some human that actually uses em-dashes

Personally I'm just not open to cold calls, period, ever. Not ever

I don't actually understand why anyone would be. Please don't waste my time trying to sell to me. If I'm in the market for your service, I'll let you know