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\"racism and xenopobia may play some part in the former British colonies frustration\"
Xenophobia - check
Racism - double check
'former' British colony? - I thought you were talking about Australia. I assume you mean the US here. Last I checked, Australia still hadn't voted on independence from England (despite having its tongue so far up America's arse).
\"Xenophobia - check
Racism - double check\"
Hrrrmmm... I'm *sure* racism/xenophobia plays a part in the grievance, but I think a lot of it is also a lack of ability for these workers to do the job due to *very* high turnover rates.
I had a friend that was very involved in moving a major company's customer support operation from the U.S. over to India; one of their primary problems was that they would invest a certain amount of training in their customer service reps only to have them move to a higher paying rival company as soon as their contract was up. The rival company would only spend a fraction of employee training costs. As a result, by the time employees where starting to get their balance in the original company, they would leave and the end-users (us) would get stuck with some poor schmuck that would have had only a couple of days experience on the phones. And, of course, these short lived customer reps have the added difficulty of doing all of this under the umbrella of a foreign tongue and it just makes the quality of the service abysmal. You don't need to be racist to hate bad service (though I'm sure it helps).
That's a good point, fizzer. Mine though was picking up an issue in the article: that a difficult situation is just made worse by a very poor cultural disposition toward foreigners.
We Australians are, of course, on the whole racist, just like the residents of every other nation on earth.
I assure you, however, that it is not racism that fills my heart with hatred when I pick up the phone to hear a long pause, then a voice reading some script or other the content of which I have difficulty discerning, thanks to the strangely low sensitivity that Indian phone headset mics seem so often to have.
Also, telemarketing is still quite a novelty for most Australians, and many of us are therefore quite surprised to discover that we've been called away from whatever it was we were doing to receive a muffled solicitation with an earth-moon round-trip delay.
There's probably a hatred curve to be drawn here, with extremes both at the not-called-very-often and called-35-times-a-day ends.
So that means my call center will now revert back to the Oklahoma State Prison System? Sweet!