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Diverse Workforce = Rubbish Customer Service
Alex Kurtagic
September 26, 2009
One of the most nefarious developments in modern times has
been the wholesale conversion of corporate businesses to the ideology of
diversity and multiculturalism. Another has been the enthusiastic adoption by
the same of interactive voice response (IVR) technology. And yet another has
been the decision in the past five or so years to relocate call centers
overseas. Occurring in combination, as they always do today, has been one the
most easily recognizable factors that compound the ever-growing misery of modern
living.
I do not wish to be pious about this: Providing consistently good customer service, particularly when the customer base is very large, is not easy (even if it comes down to a few simple principles). After all, there are all sorts of people out there, with wildly varying temperaments, backgrounds, and levels of intelligence, and, in a consumer culture that has progressively exacerbated the most selfish, hedonistic, and childish attitudes of humans, satisfying them all while under constant pressure demands the successful adoption and internalization of a highly artificial frame of mind.
Moreover, in a society where customer and businesses are
dependent on the correct functioning and operation of a complex infrastructure,
things can and do go wrong. And therefore, going nuclear every time there is a
product or service malfunction — “It’s not my problem! I paid and I expect
service! I demand a full refund and compensation or else I am going to
sue your company for a million dollars!” — only betrays the spoiled
mind of five-year-old inside the body of an adult.
Having said that, one would expect that large organizations with decades of experience and vast funds at their disposal, would have this down to a science. One would expect that, in the event of a product or service malfunction, it would be possible to an intelligent human being to resolve the issue. Instead, we are often forced to burrow deep into a company’s website to find a telephone number (a tactic inspired by the dotcom revolution). If we find one at all, we immediately hit a brick wall with the company’s IVR: hierarchical menus stacked to the sky with interminable options, all of them slowly enunciated with infuriating prolixity, occluded by product promotions, and structured so that the desired option is right at the end.
Then come the queues and the stupefying happy music, cut through with yet more irritating promotions, each insulting the customer with the voice’s cheerful sing-song delivery. And finally, if we have made it that far on the vampiric premium telephone number (time is money after all!), we may be greeted by a thickly-accented foreign national based somewhere across the world (typically India), who has been lobotomized and trained to reply to all queries by reading from a script. The script often provides perfectly good answers — to a completely different question. And, if our issue happens to fall outside a pre-determined set of typical situations, the agent may well transfer us to an equally obtuse colleague in an adjacent cubicle — or else simply drop our call.
The world of
Mister is already here.
Encounters with
Homo Cubiculus Indosensis
Some months ago I found myself unable to login to my online banking account and dialed my bank’s customer service line in order to get the issue resolved. After spending time and money on their premium line, wading my way through their menus and announcements, I got through to an agent in India. And as either her English or her listening and comprehension skills – or both – were deficient, I had to explain my problem five times before she concluded that I had to be transferred to a colleague “in a different department” (i.e., in another cubicle).
The process was repeated four times, each step involving
long waits while on hold, and each time with identical results, until I was
finally cut off. I had to ring a further two times before the cause of the
problem was ascertained. And even then it was only ascertained by inference
— my inference —
based on the pattern of scripted answers I was being given. It turned out that I
had been issued a new card — a card that was still
in the mail and about whose existence I had not been informed (here, one has to
insert one’s debit card into a portable device supplied by the bank in order to
obtain a random numeric code with which to log in).
More recently
I had to speak to British Gas concerning an error in our bill. Once again, I
found myself talking to an agent in Poona or Bombay. I am accustomed to dealing
with people from all over the world, many of whom communicate in heavily
accented English; but in this instance the operator’s accent was so impenetrable
that I could barely understand him, and at one point, after going in circles and
spending many minutes repeating myself, he launched into a diatribe,
machine-gunning a discharge of harsh syllables in an incomprehensible pidgin.
This, I thought, reflected rather poorly on British Gas and never
mind the fact that I was forced to tell a foreigner in India
—
a citizen of another sovereign state —
about my private billing issues in England.
Some five
years ago I discovered that payments made to me were suddenly not reaching my
PayPal account. I rang PayPal’s support line and I found myself speaking to a
foreign national from South East Asia. In theory, this ought to have been
slightly better, as South East Asians have higher IQs. Unfortunately, however,
the agent in question spoke in a heavily accented English, to the point where I
had to ask him to repeat each of his replies to me two or three times. More
interestingly, I ended with the distinct impression that our brains were wired
differently, for the agent frequently interpreted my statements in ways that I
found counterintuitive. This is not an issue I ever encountered with a native
English —
or even a native European —
customer service or technical support representative.
Prior
experience showed that the quality of interaction was not significantly better
on a face-to-face level where a large company had embraced diversity. Back in
the 1990s I had technical issues with my CD player as well as with a graphics
card for my computer. In each case I physically displaced myself to the site
where the manufacturer or the vendor promised any technical issues would be
resolved. In both cases I was attended to by a gentleman from India: one
provided living proof of
Robert Putnam’s unwelcome
findings, exhibiting a complete lack of
manners, aloofness, and low levels of trust; while the other proved
uninterested, laconic, and generally useless. I never came back and told
everyone I knew about my experiences with the companies in question. So much for
diversity as a driver of growth.
It would be
disingenuous to attribute all instances of poor customer service to the presence
of staff belonging to racial groups not our own: We have all experienced plenty
of incompetence, aloofness, and idiocy from White customer service staff also,
while, if we are honest, we have also encountered courteous, conscientious, and
capable Indians.
Yet the
effects of diversity —
and I class having a call center in India while retaining operations in the West
as having a diverse workforce —
are immediately noticeable and deleterious: in a society already frustrated by
the irrational outcomes of McDonaldization, diversity introduces a whole new
level of complexity in the execution of an already challenging task. We no
longer only have to waste time and money trying to get past the ubiquitous IVRs
in order to get hold of a human. We now also have to waste time and money
attempting to overcome
language barriers, mutual distrust, outgroup indifference, and
discordant cognition patterns when we finally do.
Rip-Off
Businesses that engage in this practice are ripping off their customers, for they continue to charge full price for the provision an inferior service. Good customer service for me is being able to get through to a human advisor quickly (without being fleeced by an over-wrought IVR on a premium telephone number) and being able to communicate normally. Most importantly, good customer service is my ending with a clear sense that the advisor at the other end of the line is a helpful fellow, capable of understanding that I am person too, and not simply an obstacle or a resource.
Yet, there is
evidence to suggest that normal communication is unlikely to occur between
members of different racial groups in a racially diverse society, especially
where these groups typically perceive themselves in competition for resources
with one another (see, in addition to Putnam, J. Philippe Rushton’s
Race, Evolution, and Behavior, and Michael Levin’s
Why Race Matters?). Diversity greatly exacerbates pre-existing
dynamics.
If it is
difficult enough to relate to the disembodied voice of a complete stranger
employed by a large, faceless corporation that we feel has already ripped us off
(because, if all was well, after all, why would we need to call customer
service?), and against whom we see ourselves pitted in uneven competition. This
difficulty can degenerate into outright suspicion and hostility when the voice
is that of a foreign national, sitting in a cubicle, in an exotic country, with
a different culture and language, thousands of miles away, benefiting at the
expense of our fellow citizens, thanks to the desire of the corporate machine to
further improve its vast profit margins.
Occurring in
the context of a media, academic, and government power apparatus that
continuously promotes diversity and multiculturalism, is obsessed with finding
White racism anywhere and everywhere, and is constantly accusing Whites of being
racists, the only racists, and the only ones capable of racism, the Indian call
center proves emblematic of how modern Western societies are being transformed
by a small clique of mediacrats, academics, and corrupt or ethnically-motivated
government officials into places Whites no longer recognize as their traditional
homeland.
The Indian
call center is perhaps innocuous enough in and of itself. But because it occurs
in an increasingly inhospitable ethno-cultural climate, It seems yet another
step in the apparent program to disprivilege, dispossess, replace, and
extinguish the White race. Whether this apparent program is the brainchild of a
pathological genocidal clique of Jews or Marxists or self-hating Whites or
hybrids of the above, or the result of a confluence of socio-economic processes
that have run amok, matters very little: The end result is the same.
Kevin
MacDonald has in
previous articles
highlighted the growing anger among Whites in America faced with this process of
homeland alienation. The growing electoral successes of disestablishmentarian
parties across Europe, as well as the growing litany of under-reported
ethno-cultural skirmishes that have flared in tandem with the advance of
multiculturalism in Europe and far-flung European outposts, indicate that this
anger transcends the United States’ jurisdiction, and is not due
—
contrary to Jimmy Carter’s
bizarre allegations
—
to Obama’s being Black.
Angry Customer
A grass-roots movement against “Bangaloring” (i.e.,
outsourcing call centers to India) has already started. The Times of India
reports the growing incidence of angry Americans telephoning Indian
call centers (as well as
Australian call centers employing Indians) to simply subject operators
to abuse. The object is to force businesses that have offshored their call
centers to abandon this practice, as can be see in the following internet
posting quoted in the aforementioned publication:
"I have
inside knowledge of call centers, having worked in several. It's crucial that
the agents be efficient. Barraging them with 60-second calls will ruin their
stats and also lower their morale. Eventually, they'll start thinking 'another
damn rude American a******' every time a call comes up. All of this will have a
cumulative effect. If 100 people across the US would commit to spending 10
minutes a day, we could cripple them, and bring those jobs back to the US."
The problem is that this is probably not effective. Not only does it target the lowly peon, who has little influence, but India can sustain high staff turnovers for much longer than we can, thanks to her huge population, and Indians all want a slice of the Western El Dorado. Moreover, operators are already being trained in deflecting and neutralizing abusers. No. The key is in providing Bangaloring businesses with an economic rationale for good customer service, and to make them understand that good customer service means being able to talk to a fellow citizen who looks and sounds like one of us, and who can speak normally. Companies like Amazon have understood that good customer service is the key to a good reputation and sustainable profits.
If you are not quite ready yet to grab your Uzi and start
the revolution, you can always do your bit by engaging in guerrilla economics.
Large businesses are more vulnerable than you think, and their awesome size is
as much a liability as it is an asset for them: They are slow to adapt; they
have a lot to defend and a lot to lose, as do their executives, They are seen as
arrogant and inhuman, as are their executives; so these businesses’ entire
management live in fear: The cost of a wrong decision or of bad publicity is
astronomical, as IBM found
out in the 1980s and as
Gerald Ratner found out
in 1991 (see also
this). You can show them how it is done with your own business and
start siphoning off their angry and alienated customers (positive guerrilla
economics), or you can be angry customer-activist (negative guerrilla
economics).
Make being an
awkward customer a form of individual resistance. Visit Paul English’s
website and find out how to bypass
IVRs and talk to a human. If you are in the UK, visit
saynoto0870.com and
find out how to avoid premium
numbers. And, most importantly, use Bangaloring companies’ own feedback
forms to tell them why you were not happy with their customer service or
technical support (but avoid any racial angle and concentrate on language
barriers and operators’ unsatisfactory levels of cognitive ability).
Alex Kurtagic
(
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