While troubleshooting a problems with circuits provided by AT&T I’ve had to deal with a number of people. If I end up building a simple tech support relationship after a few hours I sometimes ask where in the world the tech is. I also sometimes will ask if I don’t recognize as accent or if I think I do know the accent and want to verify it.
In some cases though, I ask out of frustration. Frustration caused by not being able to understand the person because English is not their first language. Today was one of those days. The support person was from Singapore. I was troubleshooting errors on a T1 circuit that was provided to a city in Arkansas. This troubleshooting was being performed in the middle of the day. The office had been running on the backup circuit so intrusively testing the main circuit was ok.
Now I work with vendors a lot. I realize that it is cheaper to provide around the clock support by using call centers in other parts of the world during prime times. By doing this you can have employees working ~8am to ~5pm local times. I am ok with this. However if it is 1pm Central Standard Time. Why am I speaking to singapore? Is there no one in the United States of America who can troubleshoot a T1 circuit?
ATT, why am I speaking to Mr. Gonzales in singapore? To add to the situation, we are talking over each other because of the lagged out voice call. It feels like we need to say “over” each time we complete a statement.
From what I can gather Tier1 is in India or Pakistan. and Tier2 is in Singapore. There is a tier3 but you can only talk to them if ATT manages the router. I know the implementation and designer guys are in the USA. New York actually I believe. So setting up the circuits I get to speak to people in the USA. For everything else I am having to deal with Singapore and India. For what I pay, I want someone in the USA during business hours of 8am-5pm Central.
