Female caller: Cen I spik to meessis Shair-ul merd baggage plis?
Me: Speaking
Female caller: Hullo. I am collink from ze HSBC. Bee-vore cen spik about yor accunt I neet you to gif me (blah blah blah) ent yor date off birt. Plis?
Me: No, thankyou, goodbye.
I know it looks like she had a German accent, but to be frank I don't know what it was. I know the HSBC have very frustratingly given a lot of work over to Indian call centres, but this woman sounded more like a squeaky, disinterested version of Avid Merrion.
So now if your bank wants to talk to you they do it via someone in another country;
- Who has a painful accent which is hard to follow
- And who has no idea what its like to live here and what the sums he/she refers to mean in real terms
- And who probably doesnt even work for the company or give a shit about hitting the wrong button
- Nor about UK standards of data protection
But when by all thats holy did the tossers give up on even the courtesy of asking if its a good time to talk?
8 comments:
Oooo you've hit a sensitve spot there!
Quite apart from the rudeness and no time is ever a good time I reckon, with all our need for security measures I am gobsmacked that all these people pushing their banking products have the audacity to ask US for our sensitive bank security details which we are then expected to freely give. WHY do they want our security details when THEY just want to sell the latest loan or mortgage or whatever. Especially when (and I have asked them!) that they don't even have access to my bank details.
In my mind, all it takes is for a rifle through my bin and then a few follow-up bogus bank calls and before I know it they know how to access my accounts.
I want to tell them eff off but sometimes I manage to put them on the spot and ask them how they can prove they are who they say they are.
Harumph!
BTW - I loved your transcription.... I was reading it with hopefully the right accent. I love accents :-)
I took two heads off last week, both calling from Honda to ask me to participate in a customer service satisfaction survey. I told the first caller, "This is not a good time. We're sitting down to dinner. Goodbye."
She said, "When is a good time to call?"
I said, "NOT DINNERTIME!"
Second guy called at dinner time, too. I decided to answer his survey, and I answered every question with my "CAN WE GET THIS OVER-WITH?" nasty, clipped tone. Finally, at the end of the survey, he asked if I had any complaints about Honda's Service department. I said:
NO! My only complaint with Honda is that their CUSTOMER SERVICE SATISFACTION SURVEYORS CALL DURING DINNER!
He said, "We would like you to participate in a more detailed survey. Would you prefer to receive the questions by phone,or by email?"
I shouted my email address at him and slammed the phone down.
I have never had so much fun filling in the "comments" section of a survey in my entire life.
"If your people ever call my house again, I WILL trade in for a Toyota!"
Fuckers.
Dinner time is always a good time to talk - after all, who needs to eat, right? You can mumble incomprehensively through your lamb chop and they can mumble equally incomprehensibly through, well, whatever it is they mumble through.
I seem to recall doing a post on this subject some time back - I recall, I set Granny Were on them... and she's telepathic remember... Scary, very scary - my advice, get telepathic and then tell the offending caller you know what colour knickers she's wearing and were she lives.
These people hate me. When they ask for (blah, blah) and date of birth as a security measure I simply tell them that as they're my bank they should have these details anyway and could they give them to me to prove to me that they're my bank and not some crook calling to try to get my bank details. We go back and forth like this until one of us decides that we have better things to do with our time.
Great fun. Either that or I just hang up.
I bank with First Direct and all their people seem to be Scottish.
Can't understand a word they say either... ;-)
Ok ok, this isn't a dig at the Scots but ya know, Glaswegian can be a bit tricky sometimes!
I HATE telemarketers. I usually ask them to remove me from their call list. My husbands favorite response.... Cen I spik to meesstear Reendy plis? ....No, he died.
I especially dislike the ones that can barely speak English. This also includes when you call the company for assistance. I work for a telecommunications company. Several of our jobs have been lost to out sourcing over seas. It's sad, if you attempt to ask questions that stray from their script, the representative becomes confused and even more annoying. They haven't got a clue how to respond. However, they are more apologetic than any other representatives. Under the circumstances, I suppose they have to be.
I phoned the burglar alarm call centre and got much the same response. I thought they must have moved it to Bombay.
When the engineer came out I asked him if the call centre was very far away and he said, "Yes it's in Manchester."
I rely on caller id to avoid most of them. I used to ask them, are you a telemarketer? Or is this a telemarketing call. They always say no and get flustered.
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