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Indian Accent Doesn’t Fly

Delta Air Lines, J P Morgan drop use of Indian call centers.

By LIFS May 5, 2009 at 12:25 AM

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Citing a backlash from customers who complained that they were finding Indian accents hard to understand, Delta Air Lines has dropped the use of Indian call centers to handle sales and reservations.

Delta is retaining its call centers in Jamaica and South Africa, which generate far fewer complaints.

Under criticism from angry Florida lawmakers, JP Morgan has also announced that it will no longer route food stamp recipient calls to Indian call centers. The company services Florida’s Electronic Benefit Transfer program. The company directed overflow calls from EBT card holders to two Indian call centers.

Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Valrico, said, “We should not have any jobs going outside of the country. We have enough people here in our country, we need to take care of our own who need to work.”

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Comments (4 posted)

Ron Barker July 2, 2009 at 2:33 AM

The problem with Indians is they tell you they understand you and they\'ll take care of it, but they never do. If it\'s not on their checklist, they\'re clueless. This comes from first hand experience with them.

Anne July 2, 2009 at 1:42 AM

There is nothing more annoying than to have a problem and get an Indian on the phone. They just read the canned responses that they have in front of them and never take any initiative. They also do not understand that in the USA the customer\'s satisfaction is extremely important, not just to satisfy their employer.

Frank Griffin May 24, 2009 at 7:59 PM

I have used Indian call centers before and what I didn\'t like about them is that if there was a misunderstanding they would always tell me to speak louder to the point of yelling for them to hear me. I think the volume comment was just to buy time on their part to understand me better. In the end I felt they were not being honest with me so I was not happy when this occurred. This happened maybe 30% of the time. Some of the Indian call people were excellent accent or no accent.

Jeff May 16, 2009 at 4:03 AM

I work at L2accent, a job where we train immigrants to reduce their accent for better job opportunities. A lot of our students are from, Qubec, Russia, and China respectively. While there is a large amount of Indians in my city, many feel their accent is no worse than an Australian, or British, compared to a North American. To some degree, that is a valid point and some may simply face discrimination where a Brit or Aussie would not.