That we don't like them sending our jobs overseas.

The other day I rang an oil company. I wanted to know what was the correct grade of their oil to use in the car my youngest daughter had bought.

Long ago I was a member of this companies racing team, so have a soft spot for them. I was not too happy when I heard an Indian voice on the phone. I had previously found them very good in giving such advice, & transferring you to a technical person when required.

Not only do I not trust some Indian, who's main skill is speaking English, to advise me properly on things mechanical, but I have tinnitus, so most accents make it harder to understand what is said.

After a most unsatisfactory experience, I have changed my oil company.

Then my phone stopped working. When I rang for help, I got a Philippine accent. This one was so thick I could not understand them at all. It took 4 goes to find someone I could understand.

Then I found the operator was following some script, & would not vary from it to answer my questions.

Is it any surprise that I now have a different phone company.

I have decided that any company that connects me to an overseas call centre will have one less customer, immediately. These centers are an impost on my well being, & I will no longer do business with companies who use them. If enough of Ozzies do the same, companies will soon stop using them.

Come & join me in making companies respond to our annoyance.

Hasbeen. Ever been to a garden centre and looked at a Venus fly trap?

Come on old boy! You can do it:)

"Time to tell the big companies"......You might want to take your own advice:) There;s a new plot in the hot seat;)

BLUE

yes i have a limited 'service provider'[dodo]
i contracted with them to supply internet cionnection
50 dollars @ 250 meg per month

i have not yet recieved my full meg downloads
infact the meg was accumalative
so i rang em, up

got an indian
took half an hour to finally get to some superviser
who 'gave me some extra megs'

but in reality was only giving what i paid for
its as slow as[you cant watch movies]or listen to web audio
often it runs out only halfway downloading these pages

i often get only the adverts

its based on enron teqniques
its pathetic

i tried to get another [vodaphone]
99 dollars for 12 mths i gig per month

who took over my 3..
[which was great]

anyhow vodaphone had 3 bugs i had to work my way past
i finaly managed after much searching for solutions
to get to vodaphone login

after it failed to log me in
[after taking all my details 4 times]
over two day's..i took it back to woo-lies for a refund

we are being scammed big time
in all 'services'

much more than we can ever be allowed to know

here is the basic scam

http://employmentpolicy.org/topic/23/blog/if-it-sounds-too-good-be-true-what-you-need-know-don%E2%80%99t-about-privatizing-infrastructur

Dear Hasbeen,

Have you tried using the post instead?

Just write your query/request/complaint on a sheet of paper, sign, date, place it in an envelope, write their address and yours on it, add a stamp and drop it in the red box around the corner. It worked for 100s of years and it still works well now.

Good luck!

It is because we are a shareholder driven economy not a citizen driven society. We are only a democracy in a minimalist sense, voting every three years and even then the voting choice is slim pickin's, and if you vote on a particular policy you are likely to get less or more than you bargaine (political promises being what they are).

I will sign up to your cause Hasbeen, and have been ditching companies for years that offshore jobs to any large degree if you can actually get an honest answer out of the big corps. I reckon our choices are becoming less and less but maybe if more and more people blacklisted, consumer power would win the day.

Since the GFC hit hard the United States, interested groups and governments (ironically) are supporting huge Buy Local Save Jobs campaigns - it had to come. It is pointless, and people are reaslising it, to argue for cheap goods by using poor workers, and then not being able to afford it anyway because of high unemployment.

I assume that you are equally willing to bear the extra cost to those services, Hasbeen, that your demands would entail?

I hope so.

Because, whether we like it or not, there is a "price that the market will bear" factored into the service. If that requires a minimum of telephone support, from a crowded call-centre in Bangalore or Manila, then that is the decision made by the service provider.

You benefit from the lower price, but suffer accordingly from the lower service levels.

However, if there turned out to be a demand for a premium service, where the call-centre phone-jockey has a familiar accent, and the employees are rewarded and compensated according to our Employment Laws and Workplace Relations Acts, you may be sure that the companies would jump at the chance.

That's how the airlines make extra dollars from the seats at the front of the plane. The journey is the same, but the profit margin on those seats is massively higher, as the passenger pays more for the extra simpering.

If there were insufficient simper-addicts - and if public servants had to pay their own fares - they would not offer such a "premium" service.

In short, the way to "tell the big companies that we don't like them sending our jobs overseas" is to tell them that you are willing to pay more. If there are enough of you with a short fuse and tinnitus, you'll get your wish, sure as eggs.

Incidentally...

>>The other day I rang an oil company. I wanted to know what was the correct grade of their oil to use in the car my youngest daughter had bought<<

Had you thought of using the internet?

http://www.valvoline.com.au/pdf/Essential%20Guide%20to%20Motor%20Oil%20Brochure%20FINAL.pdf

Get your daughter to tell you about it sometime - it can be very useful.

'paying more'
hasnt given me better electricty
or better gas or better water

paying toll hasnt made the road faster
paying extra bus fare hasnt made the ride any better

lets face it
those 700 telstra workers[in oz]
was under the current price regeme
[will the 'savings be passed on?
[will the caller price fall?

no the shareholders will claim it all
or whats left ..after the ceo's get their bonus

cheaper for them
dont equate to cheaper for us

look at the maintance of the rail network
or privatisation of power/phone/water

their bottum line
is charge all the market will bear

and igf they can cream off the cream
and add in the whey..[like they do with brand name milk]
they will do it

Fair point, oug.

>>'paying more' hasnt given me better electricty or better gas or better water<<

But Hasbeen's concern is not the product, but the extra service he demands.

If the phone, electricity, gas and water utilities didn't have to talk to you, they would not need to charge so much. We create the problem by expecting them to drop everything they are doing to answer a question on what grade of oil to use.

Do we really need to be so helpless? Have we reached the point where we expect somebody else to do our thinking for us, on everything? And then complain when they don't have the right accent...

Strewth. We deserve everything we get.

Where do we get the employees from, AU is near full employment, immigration is on the outer, and hasbeen wants more employment.

Not sure whether the following would have happened whether the "job" was overseas or not.

I had a bundled phone and internet with OPTUS. The internet went very slow one day, a tad above dial -up speed. Checked everything. No luck. I knew I was in for a problem. I rang OPTUS and got a very pleasant Indian voice. Explained the problem. He said, (translated from what he actually said) "Your speed is not slow enough for us to take action." Incensed, I demanded a supervisor. Same stuff. I tried again the next day, lost any sense of politeness and screamed at them. Went up through the layers and got a "we'll look into it".

Days later, I got a call from from a TELSTRA technician who told me I had problem. Yes.... "I'll call you back".

Some hours later, the tech did ring back. Problem fixed, the faulty equipment had been replaced.

I closed my OPTUS account immediately and went to TELSTRA. At least, they tell you where they are when you call with a problem. Usually Ballarat. So I did tell OPTUS. Did they care? Of course not. Another punter will get sucked in to a too good to true offer.

What I don't get, is that this guy was a member of an oil companies' racing team, and yet cannot work out what grade of oil to use in a standard car?

Owners' manuals are very informative as well. Many of them are downloadable these days.

Oddly enough I know many people of Indian extraction that work (or have worked) in local call centres. They say most people automatically assume they are being routed to an overseas centre because of their accents. Apparently the hours suck, as well as the pay and the many rude buggers on the other end of the phone don't make the working conditions all that good either. Just the ticket for casual student work that most Aussies wouldn't touch with 10 foot flagpole.

Pericles, there are some stupid people in this world, & you appear to be one of them. Running off at the keyboard, without gathering the facts is typical of these folks.

Also typical of the stupid, is breaking an engine that is a little special, & far from ordinary, then deciding to ask for advice after it is too late.

The company involved will still have a competition department, & a research lab, where clever people learn from their customers experience. This move off shore has reduced access to these departments, for those like me who are no longer involved in the top level of the sport.

This is probably reducing their usefulness, but this is what you would expect from the bean counter department, who would not know the first thing about how oils are formulated.

In this age, where almost any company can supply my requirements, they spend huge sums on promotion, & advertising, trying to win my business. If they realise that the few cents saved by sending their call centre offshore is negating this huge effort, I'm sure they will wake up. We just have to make sure they know.

When it comes to phone companies, & the like, where the only thing they offer me is service, it is even more stupid. My first & probably only contact with them, apart from my bill, will be with their call centre. If I was running one of these companies I would have the call centre answer to the sales department. That's where their effect of their quality, or lack of it will be felt.

Why, thank you, Hasbeen.

>>Pericles, there are some stupid people in this world, & you appear to be one of them.<<

Being called stupid by you, I can only consider to be a compliment.

>>Also typical of the stupid, is breaking an engine that is a little special, & far from ordinary, then deciding to ask for advice after it is too late<<

Here you are referring to the oil, right? There is of course no shame in not being conversant with the correct type of oil. But I do question the need to call the oil company to find out. There are easier ways.

But do tell, did you phone up your new oil supplier before you switched brands? And did you find that the cost of your call was included in the oil they sold you?

By the way, you may know a great deal (not everything, clearly) about oils and motor racing, but you know very little about the cost of running a call centre.

>>If they realise that the few cents saved by sending their call centre offshore is negating this huge effort, I'm sure they will wake up.<<

How about "40%"?

"...few big Australian companies that need extensive call centre services have kept all their call centres within Australia. The cost saving, I read, is about 40 per cent."

http://www.theherald.com.au/blogs/jeff-corbett/overseas-call-centres/1877891.aspx

The article is about Telstra's call centre in the Philippines... renew, please note.

Not the only one, either.

Grafton: http://www.dailyexaminer.com.au/story/2010/09/29/grafton-telstra-call-centre-closure/

Ballarat: http://au.news.yahoo.com/latest/a/-/latest/8728768/telstra-cuts-79-victorian-call-centre-jobs/

East Bentleigh: http://www.theage.com.au/business/another-250-jobs-to-go-after-telstra-drops-contract-20110308-1bm3b.html

Soon, you'll be getting David Thodey when you call Telstra, he'll be the only one left with a phone.

How did this subject get to be about accents. Australia has a bevy of different accents.

This is about the idea of using subsistence labour/sweatshop labour so that those who are paid much more can afford to buy cheaper goods and services, under the myth that this is good for both parties.

I am yet to see an analogy that explains how this an possibly be of advantage for anyone in the big picture or the long term. Clearly it isn't working.

Economic equity is about corrupt governments and corporations and the lack of empowerment of people living in the developing world. Instead of the West assisting in changing that position, we often (sometimes unwittingly) exacerbate it (including some pretty devastating examples of environmental degradation) in the pursuit of greater profits.

How much profit is ever enough? The problem is the system, and Hasbeen's call is one way ordinary people can exercise a bit of power.

Hasbeen I have 2 matters before the TIO regarding Telstra.

(1) They recently advised me in writing that they are about to change they way I am billed.
I have a contract. If I advised them that I was paying them differently they would refer the matter to a debt collection agency.

(2)My wireless service is absolute rubbish. They have claimed to have fixed the problem many times over the last 2 years. The variable speeds and line dropouts still continue as we speak. Instead of ringing Telstra I plug the cable in, which rectifies the problem.
Telstra persist in telling me that paying more money will fix it.

Last time they fixed it, they caused a loss of internet service on one of the computers in my home, they now tell me I need to pay more to get that service back. Whilst I also object to the loss of Australians jobs, I don't care which country the people come from that have taken those jobs. In fact the only reason they have such jobs is because they are even more desperate, disenfranchised and de-valued than we are.

Telstra should never have been Privatised. End of story. Nor should have any other essential service or Govt owned profitable monopoly.

Instead of blaming the poor third worlder on the phone line, you should blame the people who sold Telstra to business interests.

Because they are the very same people who weakened the Trade Practices Act effectively allowing the new private owners of essential services to profit at will, to adjust contracts midstream, to charge 15 cents more for petrol in a 24 hr cycle, to collude and predatory price their competition out of marketplace ala the Grocery Duopoly, to exert power both brutal and unchecked in the marketplace, on the producers on one end and the customer on the other, and so on and so forth. If you get a pay rise, they just whack up your electricity bill.

Any Gov't that has the intestinal fortitude to reverse this damage, has my full undivided attention and support.

As for race discrimination Hasbeen, their is still a law against that, and in my mind,
exists as one of my smallest minded emotions.

While the real villains drive around in Gov't cars, on tax payed millions in pensions, accepting accolades for selling the farm.
Welcome to the third world Hasbeen.

Thinker I believe I am entitled to have my call for service be answered by someone I can understand, otherwise it is me being discriminated against.

Apart from that I find it very difficult to disagree with any of your last 2 posts

Now I know why you seem so cranky all the time, Hasbeen.

You must be discriminated against a lot.

Hasbeen, I sincerely feel good about having some consensus in our opinions.

The race thing is a problem in our country, but I do concede the point your making and even go so far as to say that Telstra, is also happy about making it more difficult to understand their customer complaints resolution process. The level of service has most definitely decreased since oversea's call centres. Telstra's customers capacity, to achieve satisfaction has been greatly impeded. But Telstra's focus is for the benefit only, of it's shareholders and executives mostly overseas.

In the absence of laws that compel them to concentrate on the actual service they provide, and their obligations to Australian taxpayer for building our infrastructure in the first place and running it perfectly well without their commercial input for so long, Telstra simply doesn't have too be concerned about customer outcomes. It is a largely privately owned monopoly essential services provider. Take it or leave it if you can.

In their follow ups to resolve my complaint about billing and modifying contracts mid stream, they explained that their actions were allowed by the ACCC (a toothless organ without law to support itself), and I was re-assured that they hadn't been whacking their charges up as much as other essential services providers, citing electricity and gas providers as worse than them.

This is probably the same rationale they used with the ACCC !.

To understand this mentality, what they are saying is; "that the business environment in Australia today, means that they can do what they like", and therefore, I should feel some affection towards them, for not having whacked me as much as my electricity supplier or gas company.

I have more , but the point I am making is that Privatisation has not worked for this country, because weakening of laws protecting consumers, particularly in the area of the Trade Practices Act, and guarantees we would have taken for granted when our essential services/utilities were publicly owned, are now a distant memory.

It is not just Privatisation per se, but the way we have privatised our economy.