This is Not Bigotry

I can probably write with assurance, that over 90% of those who read this -- and we have now passed 50,000 reads on this site, by the way -- have experienced the situation in the column to follow, and that 99.99% of that 90% feel precisely as I do about it.  Either way, feel free to comment below.

We all watch the TV show "The Big Bang Theory", so you probably recall this line from the Indian character Raj Koothrappali: "I'm going to be deported.  Sent home in disgrace. Exposed to the sardonic barbs of my cousin Sanjay or, as you may know him, Dave from AT&T customer service."

Everyone laughs, because customer support in large, consumer-supported firms like AT&T has been outsourced to India and the Philippines, where thousands of people staff call centers at rates far cheaper than Americans would, between the marketplace and minimum-wage laws.  We all know that; we've all talked to them in frustration.

And we have all had our heads explode, metaphorically as, after 20 minutes on hold, some 18-year-old girl with a Filipino accent addresses your problem by reading from whatever script she has been taught to read from, whether or not it even applies to your case.

My favorite example is ironic, because Monday I did a whole piece on the idiocy and customer-unfriendliness of the Major League Baseball blackout system, with its arcane rules and bizarre zip code system.  It is very, very complex.  So imagine the scripts that "Mary from DirecTV customer service" tried to read from, when I called DirecTV over a year ago because a game had been wrongly blacked out.  I knew the rules far, far better than she, but I couldn't get her to get off her #%^%^$ script and just listen to what I was saying. 

Cut to more recent days.  The little lady and I were renting a condo here recently until our new house was completed.  The condo owner provided cable service, which was through Time-Warner, which is now "Spectrum" after its merger with Charter Communications.  We needed to reach customer service with a simple question, but apparently Time-Warner had not properly instructed its India branch, which was unable to answer with the proper script -- nor transfer me to a native American-English speaker who would understand me -- and I him (or her).  Problem never solved.

So while this piece actually is about cable company customer service, the timing element is important to the story.

A couple months before our moving day, which was to be a Friday, we realized that with TV installation only on Monday, our weekend of setting up the house would be without TV or radio (except local AM, which was not good).  So, as users of SiriusXM satellite radio in our cars, we went out and picked up a home SiriusXM radio to provide the weekend's entertainment and then music for the back yard thereafter.

The radio is a flat unit about the size of a slice of bread, and the speaker box it mounts on that has the little antenna that has to get positioned to receive the signal, connected to it, is a small boom box.
We called SiriusXM customer support, which is somewhere in southeast or south Asia, to arrange for the activation of the service.  Unfortunately, though, with the radio mounted on the speaker box, while trying to get it running with the agent on the phone, there was a message that the "antenna was defective."

After trying all the fixes that the agent had in her scripts, she said she would send out a replacement.  "A replacement what", I asked, since the antenna and antenna wire were part of the speaker box, not of the actual radio that mounted on it.  "Everything", she said, meaning they would ship a new speaker box with antenna and a new radio, because -- as she said -- they "could not tell what part was defective."

A few days later, a new radio came in the mail.  No speaker box, no antenna.  Just the radio.  I plugged it into the speaker box and got the same message that the "antenna was defective."  Were we surprised?  They had not replaced the part that their own diagnostics had identified as the problem.

But now it was a week and a half from our moving date and we needed a working product now (no, we could not go to the Best Buy where we had bought it; all the documentation said not to, but rather to call SiriusXM instead).  So I called SiriusXM support again, and after a half hour on hold and trying to get my point across to 3-4 people with similar heavy accents wasting time repeating what I had just told them -- this didn't fit any of their scripts -- I got someone to say they would overnight-ship a new "everything" -- radio, speaker box and antenna.  Overnight.  They said so.

Next day was a Saturday, a normal delivery day for FedEx.  Nothing.  No delivery, no radio.  I thought, well, maybe with the weekend involved, "overnight" meant "Monday."  As long as it was received and shown to work before the coming Friday, moving day, we were good.  Of course, when it didn't arrive Monday I called Asia again, and got zero satisfaction and zero capacity to speak with an American without a script.

The package arrived, all right.  Wednesday night.  And by "it", I mean a third radio, all by itself.  No speaker box.  Nothing worked.  I simply gave up.  I now have three perfectly functioning radios that would be just fine on a speaker box with a working antenna, we assume.  And after hours on the phone with somewhere in Asia, I had just had it.

So ... back to cable.  There are two cable companies that serve our community.  One of them is Spectrum, formerly Time-Warner.  They have a perfectly decent service when it works, but their customer support comes from overseas outsourced call centers staffed by non-Americans with that frustrating accent.

The other is a small, local company that started as an all-fiber-optic service company.  Their headquarters, along with their customer support people, sits less than twenty miles away.  When I needed to make decisions on house wiring, they were able to send an actual human being from headquarters over to the construction site to explain what cabling was necessary, what to tell the contractor to install, and how we would be able to do some things we wanted to have our TV setup do.

Needless to say, we decided to go with the local company, and we have not regretted it.  I have had to call them a number of times in the intervening month, and have gotten English-speaking local Americans, most importantly without scripts.  Ask them a question, and they consider the answer and talk to you.  And answer your issue.  I even cut them slack when there is an issue, because I know it will be easy to reach someone with an answer or a clarification.

They got my business because I felt supported.  And I can imagine that the leftist types will rail at me for being some kind of bigot, or a xenophobe, or worse, because I want to deal with people I can understand and who will answer me -- and not insult my intelligence.  My business is important to me; I felt that this company felt it important enough to them.

I have no problem meeting, chatting with, and dealing with people from non-American arenas.  But I'm an American, and I understand people better when their language is the same as mine.  And when they think about what I have said before answering -- from their head and heart, not from a script.

That's not bigotry.  That is selecting with whom to do business based on how much they show they want to do business with me.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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