A lot of the completely Canadian reps have a phone alter-ego too, though. I know a couple that speak perfect English and have completely average names, but introduce themselves as a completely different average name to customers. As long as they have a supervisor's approval, it's okay. So, you might be getting lied to more than you think!

@ChuckECheese: I think they changed it so an ISO is now available....something they should have done the first time.

Lucky for me, I'll snag it from MSDNAA

@coren: It's more likely the first call goes to a (very, very cheap) outsourcer who would then transfer you to a "real" Microsoft employee if they can't just get you to go away easily. Since the outsourcer and Microsoft would not be on the same phone system, they would literally be calling an outside line to transfer you - that's my educated guess.

@dragonfire81: If you're calling Microsoft, you are. Trust me on this ;).

@selianth:

I used to work at the front desk of a Marriott hotel back in the early 1990s. I remember getting complaints from customers when they tried calling the 800 number for the corporate offices that printed on the guest's bill. The problem was that it wasn't an 800 number but one that had a prefix of 801. When the guest would dial the number as an 1-800 number instead of 1-801 then they would get connected to a phone sex line.

Also, the hold music was this weird music box muzak version of Let It Be, and the institutional memory regarding how to change it had been lost years ago. So you'd be stuck listening to that until you eventually decided to hang up.

That was a really weird place.

@webweazel: According to friends from India who live here now, they do that so they don't have to listen to you garble their names.

@katstermonster: Okay, i'm probably the only person on earth to admit this, but Vista wasn't too much of a problem for me. Most likely because I only use my home computer for websurfing and gaming. What i've seen is that anyone who wants to use their computer for anything else was seriously mistreated by vista. Scared to upgrade to Win7 my comp is working right now

One stat for instance - AHT (Average Handle Time) is the total average for how long each call was - including wrap time (where you fill out your case notes). In the call centers I've worked at - having an AHT a minute or two over the required average was regarded a far more serious issue than anything else I ever did.

So how to reduce AHT quickly? Transfer calls into other queues, your friends cell phone - stuff like that. If the call center doesn't track dropped calls (where the agent hits the release key) - simply hanging up will reduce your AHT. I never did any of this stuff (I felt sorry for the people on the phone), but I know one guy who did and got away with it for years until someone caught him in the act for it.

Very weird. (Also kind of annoying, when people would start yelling at you about their insurance problems, no matter how many times you explained it was a wrong number.)

@MostlyHarmless: I can't wait til we hop over to 7 at work. That's going to be a fiasco, though...

Oh, and my two lab computers are probably too ancient to run 7. *facepalm*

In related news, I switched over my second computer to Windows 7 as well. Phew. Thankfully I still use XP at work, and we'll directly jump over to Windows 7.

searches are usually performed using just the first few letters... giving them lots of options for "oops i selected the wrong one" to get you off the line quickly... the least related option usually being their choice. being hostile when the rep is trying to find out which of the 3 embassy suites in town you want, having just their addresses when you only know "its close to the river"? well here... maybe the embassy of uruguay can help you. or this bbq place called embers.

and it was frequently done, with only roughly 20 minutes per week of calls being monitored per csr, and usually done on the same day and general time of day per week.

(complaining about having to press 1 for english "when this is america!", then asking for the number of a national company will nearly always get you to their spanish speaking customer service line option)

@MostlyHarmless: You'd think they'd be falling all over themselves to upgrade as many people as possible from that disaster called Vista.

Yeah Digital River is not exactly owning up to this fiasco by explaining what you actually get for $29.99.

1) After the confirmation, order goes through you get an email link to a download site.
2) The download is for an application, not Windows 7 itself.
3) The application is a download program. I think they have it so in case your network or computer craps out for any reason, the install programs remembers where you stopped and picks up from there (3 gigs would be a pain in the ass to keep downloading from scratch).
4) The download is not an ISO, a file you can burn to a DVD to run independently of the system. No, you get files that will try to install Windows 7 inside the operating system you are currently running. Vista? Then it is an upgrade. XP? Beware as this will delete everything to install Windows 7 from scratch.
5) Also, if you ordered a 64-bit Windows 7 and you have a 32-bit Windows system, you will not be able to install or fix the download from crapping out (two are incompatible, however a 64-bit should be able to install down to a 32-bit system). THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOTED ON THE SITE UP FRONT!

So yeah, some simple corner cases should have been run to see what to expect from people downloading this. Instead, it made for a very rough unexpected time when it shouldn't have.

@mazzic1083: I doubt most of them would work for $100 a month answering tech support questions though. Speaking as someone who works for a company that outsources most of it's support to India, and in an industry that does the same across the board, when you call and get an Indian accented person on the line, he or she is in India.

@webweazel: Ever been to NYC? Plenty of American citizens there who have Indian, African, Italian, Irish, etc accents and they are still American. How would you know the difference of an Indian or NYC call center?

Only reason I say this is that people forget all the time that we have lots of perfectly legal immigrants in this country who still maintain their ethnicity and accents.

If the reps are incompetent, okay, say so. But there are good, and bad, call center workers in just about any country in the world (there are probably still places without their own call centers).

@evelus2: I just love to get one of the Indians, with a super-thick accent who says his name is Bob Stevens. Yeah, right. I know it is hard for us STUPID americans to deal with long and/or foreign names, but at least give us a chance.

Wait, what?

@evelus2: The fact that many companies outsource specifically to India seems to have escaped you. I have on many occasions gotten the outsourced rep that has had a very discernable "Indian" accent...

Also, why are you calling places for your customers? Unlikely that a business-to-business call is going to get the same level of (un)caring that at random I-can't-figure-out-how-to-turn-on-my-computer call to Dell/Microsoft/Linksys does. (That's not a dig at the OP, but at someone like my grandmother :P)

This happens more often than you would think. When I worked at Packard Hell, a rep that worked there would transfer people to Pizza Hut. He even handed me his headset so I could listen when he did it. The guy spent 30+ minutes on hold for computer support then got transferred to Pizza Hut which them put him on hold again!

There's also the common newbie prank - a senior rep tells them to transfer something to extension 9911.

This is what happens when companies hire idiots, don't pay the few good reps well and treat them like crap.

Anyone find it funny that everytime somebody calls a customer service number they always claim it was an "indian person" I must be the luckiest person in the world because in 6 years of having to call numbers for lazy customers I have never once recieved an "indian". Are we done with this stereotype yet? Most people don't even get Indian people they just say it because it is what's expected. Also an FYI every Sprint call center is HQ'd in America so if you get an "indian" person when you call Sprint thats a non-outsourced American job so quit complaining.

However, it kindof seems like "transferring to a different CS rep" should have been an internal transfer, not one that required dialing a whole new number. So, weird.

I worked for an AT&T call center a few summers ago while I was in college and there was a direct number we could use to transfer customers to the number portability department. If the CSR mixed up the last two digits it went to an "Adult Service" line (Not AT&T). There were notes put up on every cubicle after someone made that mistake the first time.