Incompetence in International Companies Doing Business Around the World

Have you noticed a trend lately in customer service for international companies? Have you ordered a product for a domestic company and had something shipped to you, only to realize that your order was delayed by an extreme amount of time or the order came to you was nothing like the order you placed? You are probably one of the thousands of people such as me who get screwed by international services and customer service which is horrible.

I had called Dell Computers and ordered something as simple as a black and color cartridge for my laptop computer. I told them three times over the phone what I wanted which was a pretty standard order since my cartridge had run out of ink and I needed a new one. Hundreds of people each day must call Dell placing this same kind of order. However, the person over the phone probably didn't even speak English and was reading off some kind of script which they didn't understand. I had to keep on repeating myself over the phone to place my order.

Three weeks later I was left wondering why I had not received my order. I called Dell and they stated that they had in fact shipped it to my address. I repeated my address and it turns out that they got my P.O. Box wrong and typed in the wrong number into their computer.

After a month had passed by, I still had not gotten my order and I called up Dell angered. It turns out, after I spoke to a representative of the company over the phone for about an hour, they screwed up my last name. My middle name has a "V" in it and instead of a "V" they spelled it with a "Z' and that was the reason why I had not gotten it.

More and more companies are sending over their factories and customer service representatives to third world countries. Third world nations do this and outsource jobs because it is much cheaper for them to pay below the minimum wage pay that they can pay workers in the U.S. In some countries, workers may as little as one dollar or less per hour. Compare this to the minimum wage pay in the united States of around six dollars and companies save themselves a great deal of money. As a result, the customer service representatives that you speak to over the phone usually aren't American people that speak English and the translation of English words usually gets lost over the phone. This also includes spelling as some words like "their", "there" and "they're" will get mixed up in the context of how they are said.

All of this explains why my cartridge from Dell was delayed by over a month and why screw-ups such as this are likely to happen over and over again.