Amazon has changed

Frank Fusco

Member
Messages
12,782
Location
Mountain Home, Arkansas
Shopping through Amazon has always been a pretty smooth process, part of the charm. But, last night, I was looking at an item I'm considering as an accessory for my yet-to-be-purchased new lathe. While looking at it a message pops up that says if I order within the next 32 minutes shipping will be free. Well, OK, sounds like a good deal so I click it into my shopping cart. Next page, as Amazon does, shows other items I might be interested in. They were right. One of the items is the Steb drive center at a great low price. So, I click it into my cart also. Then I go through the check out process. That's where the frustration started. The system has changed within the past couple weeks. At no point did the site say the order had been placed and at no time did a "complete order" or "check out" button come up. So, I called. (that changed too, now you send an e-mail and an automated system calls you right away and puts you on hold. G-R-r-r-r.) Eventually a live person came on who did not speak intelligible English. Now, in my old age, I try not be a bigot. But, fact is, to do business one must be able to communicate with folks at the other end. We went round and round with me telling him I could not understand him and he just kept talking. Finally he put me on hold and another man came on......just as unintelligible. :bang: Like the first, he just kept talking I kept telling him I couldn't understand a word he was saying. Finally, I just hung up. Later, I called a number not specifically for customer service and eventually got switched to a man I could communicate with. Of course, my 32 minute limit for free shipping had expired. I explained this to him and he made the adjustment and placed the order. But, an hour or more, of frustration should not have happened. Without the site telling a customer when the order has been completed will cause a lot of confusion for others, I'm sure. And, in the Christmas shopping season, this could hurt Amazon. I know, I'll be reluctant to go back until they fix things. I sure know I don't want to try talking to those non-English speaking folks again. :soapbox:
 
Frank, I share your frustration with the non-English-speaking folks who are working customer service. In the past two weeks, I've dealt with Bank of America, Dell, and one other company and tried to deal with people who can't spit out a sentence that you can understand. Don't these companies realize that by having people who can't speak English, they are hurting their own business because the public will just quit dealing with them? I'm usually pretty vocal and if I get someone on the phone who is unintelligible, I'll either ask for someone else or I'll tell them to call ME back when they find someone who can speak English.

I share your rant!!

Nancy (22 days)
 
That really sucks, sorry to hear you had a problem Frank, it seems that the call center thing is a tough one, customers want the cheapest price, companies want to make a profit, so something has to give.

I'd suggest that you deal only with companies that are based in the US, and have their service and support staff in the US, who can speak your brand of English.

I guess being mono-lingual in a global marketplace can be a pain :dunno: :D

Cheers! :wave:
 
I'd suggest that you deal only with companies that are based in the US, and have their service and support staff in the US, who can speak your brand of English.

Stu, can you point us in the right direction to that company? :rofl: I share Frank and Nancy's frustration, but companies will continue to use other country's workers if it is saving them money.

I saw a show recently, I think called "30 Days", in which an american went to India to try and get a job in a call center. He quickly got one, since he spoke english, and was making the equivalent of around $2,000/month. His co-workers said they had no idea the resentment the US had toward them taking their jobs. In India, a call center job is highly sought after as well. The program said that in the US, a call center job is not that desireable, I don't know never done that or know anyone that has. Just another side of the story...maybe.:rolleyes:
 
Woodcraft
Craft supplies USA
Lee Valley
Carter Bandsaw Products

Those three are companies that I've called about a shipping or billing problem/question, and I got top class service from staff that speak English just fine and dandy, Oh, I'll add BlueHost, this forum's hosting service to the list, great service, great people to go to when you have a problem.

Everyone wants the best price, I understand that, but something has to give, businesses are not in business to loose money, but to make it. If more customers would support the good companies, the ones that make service and customer support part of the total purchase, then the rock bottom cheap price companies might feel a pinch, maybe?

Oh, I'll add Grizzly to the list of good English speakers, at least I've not heard Frank complain about their English ability when he has to call Grizzly tech support :wave:
 
Could get ver political here.................put it this way
English is becoming a second lanuage..............watch the news
and fill in the gaps :bang:
 
I think one of the problems is that so many of the call center jobs have went to India that many of those that speak English the best have already been hired. I understand that a business has to make money but they really should have some oversight of those that represent them.

And the outsourcing is starting to rapidly move up the chain, with programmers and drafting being hard hit by offshore sourcing. Engineers are next and at some point it will start to hit management.


About a year ago I went thru a 6 week fight to get my DSL service fixed and 5 weeks and 6 days of that was trying to get thru the offshore customer service to get to some one local that fixed the problem in about 2 hours. I would love for Verizon to tell me how they saved money by wasting aboyt 60 hours of cheap labor and shipping two new modems, when they could have spent the same two hours fixing the problemm at the begining of thh 6 weeks.

And the cable company won't even come to look at their problems unless I stay home through a 4 hour window for their convinence.

I suspect if the shareholders would get smart they could hire offshore CEO's at much more reasonable rates than Jack Walsh or David Cote.


Garry
 
Woodcraft
Craft supplies USA
Lee Valley
Carter Bandsaw Products

Oh, I'll add Grizzly to the list of good English speakers, at least I've not heard Frank complain about their English ability when he has to call Grizzly tech support :wave:

Woodmizer
Hartville hardware
Oneway, last time I called anyway. Oh wait thats the Canucks, close enough though, AY
Highland Hardware.
Rockler
Berea hardwoods

I'm sure I could think of more

About a year ago I went thru a 6 week fight to get my DSL service fixed and 5 weeks and 6 days of that was trying to get thru the offshore customer service to get to some one local that fixed the problem in about 2 hours.

Gary
This is why if I ever have to move I will only live some where that has Armstrong for a cable company.
2 service hour windows

Repair service at all hours

and they will help you out even though they don't technically support Linux :D

Local call center.

My cable has been out twice in 5 years. First time the modem quit. Called them at 6PM. They scheduled me for the next day at 10am to 12pm
They called back at 7pm and asked if I was going to be home. I told them yes. They had a guy in the area and he was here at 7:10. Swapped out my modem and was back on line.

Second time the internet and digital tv where wigging out. called them at 4pm. again they told me it would be the next day. about 8pm I here trucks out in the street. It's the cable guys. At 9PM one of them came to the door and told me there was a bad piece of cable and said they would have to string a new line. They strung 1200 feet of new cable and I was back online by 11pm. A couple days later I get an letter from them apologizing for the inconvenience and 3 coupons for free pay per view or in demand movies.
 
Frank, I share your frustration with the non-English-speaking folks who are working customer service. In the past two weeks, I've dealt with Bank of America, Dell, and one other company and tried to deal with people who can't spit out a sentence that you can understand. Don't these companies realize that by having people who can't speak English, they are hurting their own business because the public will just quit dealing with them? I'm usually pretty vocal and if I get someone on the phone who is unintelligible, I'll either ask for someone else or I'll tell them to call ME back when they find someone who can speak English.

I share your rant!!

Nancy (22 days)

That's surprising Nancy, bank of America has a huge call center here in Belfast, Maine (my county seat). They are talking about hiring a few hundred more people. I just assumed most of the customer service calls would come here, or at least be US based. Interesting...
 
I feel your pain, Frank. Living in LA, I have no choice but to get accustomed to hearing accents from around the world. It's still tough for my worn-out ears, though. :rolleyes:

That's surprising Nancy, bank of America has a huge call center here in Belfast, Maine (my county seat). They are talking about hiring a few hundred more people. I just assumed most of the customer service calls would come here, or at least be US based. Interesting...
Nancy may have been speaking to a US call center. I have trouble understanding the spoken English of some of the employees at the local Bank of America branches around here. There are a lot of Armenian, Russian, and Persian accents in this area of LA, as well as the expected mix of Hispanic folks.

I'm getting better at understanding Indian-accented English, since I work with several Indian engineers at the office. I still have trouble understanding a couple of the Chinese guys at the office (although one of them has excellent English writing skills.) I've also learned that the accent or country of origin doesn't affect technical skills. We've got some very sharp and well-educated engineers. One young Indian girl, in her mid 20's, started working for us a few years ago as a tester in the lab. She moved up quickly to a software engineer position. Turns out she's got a MS degree in computer science from Cal Tech. About 4' 10" tall, with a little girl's giggle (and pretty good English skills), and she's darned near a rocket scientist. ;)
 
Sorry to jump in on this thread late, but I'm a newbie here.
I've had my problems with immigrants speaking nearly unintelligible English as well. But when I was in the work force my job had me traveling a lot...Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong to name a few places. I was always part of an engineering team, so usually I was on site long enough to make friends. Except for Australia, I was never even close to being able to speak the native language, but the people I worked with were kind enough to use English to accomodate that. One engineer in Singapore that I got to know, very smart guy, told me he really didn't like to do it, because his English wasn't so good and he felt it made him appear to be less intelligent than he was...I thought that was an interesting point. But he never made me feel less because I couldn't speak Mandarin. So I tried real hard to understand his Singapore English...after all, he was doing me a favor. But, of course, I wasn't trying to become a Singaporean, either. I guess for me what all the experiences like that have done is make me fairly tolerant of people who come here and at least give it a go to speak English. Now if you're standing there in this country yattering at me in Spanish or Mandarin or Dutch and expect me to get it...well, I'm fairly intolerant of that. Another thing I realized was that the Asians I know who speak English speak very well the English that they hear all the time...which is Asian English...many aren't even aware that it just isn't...how do I say this...well, it just ain't English. And so the world turns. What does annoy me is when companies in this country put people with those kind of English language issues on phone support...all tolerance aside, this is just not the job for an employee with that problem. It's basically bad business. But someone alluded to the fact that that particular job isn't viewed with much esteem in this country, and that's unfortunately true. This is indeed the land of plenty, and one thing we have plenty of is egos...lots of those walking around. "What, you expect me to do that!?". So who can they get to do it...you guessed it. Maybe if they paid more...right, like that's gonna happen.

I think someone mentioned that English is becoming the universal language. I was once in a tailor shop in Hong Kong, and had no problem communicating with the tailor...his English was pretty good. While I was waiting there for something a Japanese guy came in. He tried talking to the tailor in Mandarin, and that wasn't working, so the tailor tried his Japanese and that wasn't working, so they ended up talking to each other in English. Which I got a big kick out of...later, of course.

But then I was on an extended project in Macon, GA a few years ago, and found myself saying "huh" a lot. And one day a guy said to me "man you sound like a durn yankee...I can't hardly understand you".

Who knew.
 
...One young Indian girl, in her mid 20's, started working for us a few years ago as a tester in the lab. She moved up quickly to a software engineer position. Turns out she's got a MS degree in computer science from Cal Tech. About 4' 10" tall, with a little girl's giggle (and pretty good English skills), and she's darned near a rocket scientist. ;)

What do you lot know about speaking English anyway!. Repeat after me
tap - not - faucet
bumper - not - fender
boot - not - trunk
colour - not - color
etc.....:D

The call centre thing can be very frustrating. We had a fire at home a few years ago. Insurer had UK call centre - absolutely faultless whenever we had to deal with them. Two years late my mother in law had a similare experience. Same insurance company but they had offshored their call centre in the meantime. Absolutely dreadful to deal with. Language was one problem but "cultural" differences were just as much of a problem. They kept sending letters addressed to my recently deceased father in law (despite having been informed of his demise some 6 months earlier) which , on top of the fire, was doubly distressing. When I phoned them to try to get it straightened the person at the other end said "I can see that he has been terminated here":(. And the letter confirming the actions was addressed to? You guessed it Mr D-- T--------- deceased.

Over here in the UK some companies are starting to make a selling point of UK only call centres. I give them my business when I can because the ability to communicate effectively is an important part of the transaction. When outsourcing first started the call centres in India at least were staffed with highly educated and linguistically skilled people. Now, my experience is that this is no longer the case.

And Vaughn - I once worked with an Indonesian lady who spoke English better than I did and had a masters in astro-physics but worked software support because she found it more interesting!!:eek:
 
Ed's post reminds me of a funny experience....

My first job after graduation was down in Mexico, doing gold exploration near a little town on the Yaqui river. One evening after I'd been working a year or so, three guys pull in to our camp to ask for directions to another town on the river (they'd turned the wrong direction). After talking to one of them for 10 minutes or so, and not being able to communicate very well, I was thinking - "Man, this guy's accent is really wierd and his spanish is as bad as mine". Up until then it had never occured to me that they were possibly not Mexican. So I ask if he speaks any english, and he says "Yes, of course" with an obvious German accent. They were German tourists and hadn't been able to make out my spanish either - just as surprised that I wasn't Mexican as I was that they weren't (we didn't see a lot of tourists in the area). So I give them directions in english in about 30 seconds, and off they go.
 
I can come up with one other company that is all USA.

Woodworker's Supply
 
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I like that company David. If everyone else has it their price often isn't the lowest (but it will be competitive), but if nobody else has it they probably do. Good customer service, too.
 
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