@Chris W

"Which means that the British can once again hold their heads up high in the knowledge that what the country has to off will be sought after the world over"

Good one. Now where do you wish to start? The millenium bridge? The NHS? The CSA? The binge drinking... Invading another country based entirely on fabricated evidence? Stopping a SFO investigation into BAE, etc., etc.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Agreed with comment below

"I think the Government should impliment an Offshore Tax against companies that offshore UK jobs to India. They are losing taxes because of this and we need these taxes to fill in the massive debt GB and NuLabour has put us in".

Only thing is that Gordo and his pals only care about the big businesses and not the UK Public so this will never get through to lords and then you have the fee taking crims who will then take another fee to prevent/delete said items from the bill anyway

This Countries f***ed

@Anonymous Coward 15:13

I wouldn't usually point out the obvious mis-interpretation that you seem to have made but in this case I think you need a bit of help and in an attempt to educate you I offer the following.

I think I started with cheap labour then moved on to CRB checks. Please revise your FAIL and learn the nuances of the English language.

Similar Standards?!!!

“This is not about customer service, as the service in our operations around the globe is of very similar standards."

Message from my colleague the other day...

"Some called from BT for you. I think it was about the line you wanted ceased - I think they said it had been done, but I am not sure as I could barely understand a word they said"

/Paris because, like India, she's abroad

Not going to be better

Remember that PC World people are mostly english... does not mean they know what they are doing.

Should be said I dont have anything against indians, except myself positioned against my indian girlfriend a few years ago now.

Best BT one i has was when my power brick for the hub died, smoke etc....

Random mumbers - eventually ----

BT - Hello,

Me - Hello, yes the power supply on my hub has died can you send me a new one.

BT - You have a problem with your Hub?

Me - Yes the power supply has exploded.

BT - Ok can you plug in the home hub so i can check the connection.

Me - WHAT? THE P O W E R S U P P L Y HAS EXPLODED.

BT - Yes sir i need to check the connection to see what is wrong with your Hub.

After a while he decided there was a hardware fault and i should call the other department.

other department decided it was a tecnical issue for the help desk.

eventually i got someone who knew what was going on and the out come was, its blown up, out of guarantee and no they don't sell or supply spares. at which point i went to maplins.

you are joking

What nonsense that it isn't about customer service. The Indian call centre staff were/are infuriating, incompetent, audible on the b/s words, " I do so apologize Mr..." and inaudlible on the information words "mumble" and they couldn't vary from a script - even when, as a caller, I could diagnose exactly where the problem was ( moved line in the end office to fix hard fault and at same instant losing broadband provision - duh).

And NO, I HAVEN'T CHANGED MY MICROFILTER, (do these ever fail?) No connected fax machine, hands free or cuddly toy gives you the remotest excuse to fob me off. Why don't you LISTEN!!!"

Moving to Sky

Was the best thing I ever did. Not only are my upload and download speeds almost twice as fast as BT said was possible on the line, I'm also paying less for the service too.

And I don't even have to pay BT line rental anymore.

Sheer bliss. Add to the fact that the call centre is in the country I live in (even if it's east coast!)makes it even better (also good in the fact that my friend's brother works in technical support and has sped things up a great deal for me)

If you're still with BT, leave them now.

BT bringing jobs back to blighty?

Livingstones comment about bringing jobs back to the UK is not what it seems. BT have a long term agreement to review numbers in the UK ( project Pond). This was agreed with the CWU when BT began to offshore jobs several years ago. Once the numbers of UK based staff reached a "trigger point" it was agreed to review if jobs could be brought back. In the economic circumstances, this has now happened. Livingstone is being disingenuous about staff numbers. It is not about keeping jobs in the UK. BT has ordered a readuction in headcount of 10% from each division. Cutting costs is their primary consideration. They have a hidden agenda of managing people out of the business - very aggressively. These numbers are not published.

As for Indian call centres, they are highly unpopular with everyone. BT realised this some time ago and began offshoring to the Phillipines, where people speak English with a slight American accent. This was supposed to prevent the caller saying, I don`t want to speak to anyone in India:)).

Meanwhile staff are being pushed out of the door by agressive/poor managers who use dubious stats to justify their bullying and intimidation. The irony is that while staff are sacked for failing to reach their targets, Livingstone has trousered £343.000 in bonuses.

It's the same the whole world over.

Down here in New Zealand, the foreign owned Telecom has shifted the call centre to India.

I immediately changed from them to a smaller (but much better)ISP.

Unfortunately , I have have to use Indian call centre for reactivating Windows XP , and to try to sofve a problem with a Hewlett-Packard printer.

The Windows centre "helper" had an accent that made getting that long string of numbers very trying. The HP "helper" gave wrong information , and I ended up going to my local computer repair man.

It seems to be the biggest problem now is , cheap regardless of quality.

I won't have to use the Microsoft India site again , I have gone to Linux OS.

"hidden agenda of managing people out of the business"

To me, this is the real BT story in the last year or two, but although I'm hearing about it from very reliable sources, I'm not reading about it in the usual places. Am I just looking in the wrong places?

Redundancies cost BT money, sometimes a lot of money depending on the deal and the individual. So they look for a cheaper alternative.

Dismissals for non-performance don't cost much at all. BT have got enough managers sufficiently worried about their own personal futures that they will do the immoral (and illegal?) bidding of the next level up, ie managers will lie about the performance of their workforce. If they give their team members sufficient bad reviews, then HR will be able to show team members the door, without compensation.

Job's a good un. Not.

Policy and behaviour like that must start very close to the top of an organisation.

Meanwhile, outsourcing or offshoring something doesn't absolve the relevant management from monitoring the quality of the delivered service. One outfit I know offshored its "routine business operations processing" (trivia like orders, ledgers, etc). Six months after the contract started, a disk failure meant there was need to restore from backup. That in itself was a bad sign - disk failure and no RAID? Turns out that the operation had been following the backup script but no one had checked it had worked. Ever. Six months of sales orders had to be re-entered. Should management have checked? Of course.

Offshoring mostly started when Motorola discovered that for various reasons they could get close to "zero defect" code for mobile handsets if they recruited India's very best engineers to develop their handset code. These folks also happened to be cheap compared with US engineers, but that wasn't the main point - the point was that they were willing to aim for and achieve "zero defects". Seems like a fine idea.

Offshoring today is a world away from what Motorola started, but as is all too often the case, the managers higher up the food chain have no comprehension of what is needed and what is appropriate for the business and its stakeholders.

re: accents

I think you're onto something with the idea of hiring us Aussies. We're an easy bunch to get along with.

"G'day, this is Bruce, owsitgoinmateorrite?"

"This is Reginald Fotherington-Smythe. I seem to be having somewhat of a problem with my internet connection"

"Strewth cobber, that's a bit rough. But don't worry, we'll have yer fixed up before you can say Gulargambone*"

(* small town in the middle of nowhere, NSW. Most famous for being closeish to Coonabarrabran).

Someone remind me why

I'm supposed to give a f### what BT are doing?

Frankly since all the past changes they made were supposed to *increase* customer service, I don't even want to consider what a change that is not supposed to touch it will do, can they really get any worse?

I personally wish BT would remove the B from their name - I work for a global company and it's embarassing that other countries might associate BT with general British cluelessness

At a corporate level BT proactive line monitoring seems to consist of "call us and we'll tell you if the line is down", and at a home broadband level their support consists of "you can't get the 1Mbs speed you pay for as it is an out of date service - to get the speed you pay for you need to upgrade to 8Mbs and sign an 18month contract, at which point we'll be able to give you 3Mbs"

My customer and I both left BT a long time ago and since then my life has been a lot easier

Smiley cos now I get to speak to someone who speaks the same language, understands how routers actually work and just fixes the issue instead of looking for reasons it's not his problem or coming up with some random bullshit