By now, I’m sure everyone has encountered the dreaded “customer service” call centre that’s definitely not from around here.
If the thick accents and doubtful ability to comprehend clearly spoken English aren’t a dead giveaway, the slavish devotion to policy, process, and above all “The Script” will certainly remove all doubts that you’re about to enter a particularly hellish dimension of what the corporate world thinks “customer service” ought to be.
It was inevitable that most technical support was going to be off-shored as it was a cheap way to pump up the stock price by getting rid of the expensive people who actually knew how the system worked and what they were doing and might (on their day!) actually care about solving the problem in favour of a vast army of call centre drones armed with a degree from the “{Insert New Technology Here!} For Dummies” book and a script that they are not to deviate from in any way whatsoever.
In recent years, far more critical “customer service” functions have found themselves suddenly starring our friends from the India or the Philippines (if you’re theoretically lucky) with access to extremely sensitive data that should never have left the borders of the United States.
Take last night’s oh-so-fun activity of trying to prevent further attempts by scammers who had managed to get Capital One to actually issue a credit card in Nicholas’ name and for some reason they actually did so in spite of a stated suspicion it was fraudulent and they put it in the post anyway.
Part of the recovery was to sign on to the three major credit bureaus and put a freeze on the credit report (and in his case add the fraud alert as it was his credit report that was compromised by a very permissive industry whose idea of “security” is utterly laughable).
That actually worked pretty well for the most part…we got his credit report as secured as we can without paying a huge bribe to each credit bureau to combat a problem that’s entirely of their own making by being very lousy at securing sensitive data which seems not only wrong but completely unjust!
After he buggered off to his bed, it was time for me to start securing my credit reports in the same way and that worked pretty well…or so it seemed until I got to TransUnion.
I was able to create a new login for me separate from his and access the site.
But when it came time to actually put the freeze on and access the credit report for free thanks to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, no joy and a customer service number to ring in the morning.
Switching browsers didn’t work so I’m pretty sure that whoever designed and implemented the security on their site probably used a naive combination of IP address capture and cookies even though our logins were completely separate to lock me out of doing any of the functions on offer on the site.
A few hours later, enter “Sebastian” who was clearly from Bangalore or Hyderabad and whose technical knowledge past the usual level 1 call centre script was nil. Ten frustrating minutes later, I’m finally connected with “supervisor Kevin” whose voice sounds suspiciously like “Sebastian” by tries to convince me otherwise (he might well be schizophrenic but somehow I doubt he’d know how to really pull that off convincingly) who then wastes even more time “verifying” all sorts of very sensitive information.
I don’t know about you but in an era where horrific data breaches of financial information seemingly happens every day, the fact that this data isn’t locked down hard and only accessible by agents who are physically in this country and thus can be held accountable for breaches of FCRA scares the hell out of me.
I realise that home-grown customer service agents are far more expensive than their overseas counterparts but I’m of the opinion that any savings realised from much cheaper labour will be outweighed by orders of magnitude the first time these script jockeys royally screw up things so badly that the company that off-shored this function will be fined into oblivion.
I can’t see where it’s worth the risk to the business and especially it’s reputation, particularly when you’re talking about a credit bureau whose industry’s reputation is already well past the bowl of the toilet and in the sewer beyond the bog.
“Kevin” would never admit that I was right in my suspicion but what he did on his end was even more terrifying by modifying a few critical items in the online system’s view of my credit report that had apparently gotten “confused” (his words).
I log in and try to set the freeze (most critical) and it immediately failed with a similar error message which I relay to him. A few keystrokes on his end and I try it again and it works.
This is bringing back horrifying memories of the Amazon supposedly AI-powered cashier-less stores where script jockeys in India were silently watching the person’s trolley and adding/removing items in their online shopping cart in real time on the back end instead of letting the RFID tags do what they’re designed to do at the exit.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Amazon decided to bin their “Just Walk Out” stores once that dirty little secret was exposed…and that they still have yet to admit was actually happening all along!
Next stop, generating the credit report which unsurprisingly fails and says it’s “unavailable”. A few keystrokes later…
Ditto the dispute screens!
OK, I’ll admit I’d never been impressed with TransUnion (after all, these people thought I was born in 1926 and was in my fifties when I graduated university decades ago) but this is a new low in an industry that seems to find a newer low every time I turn around.
But when I’m confronted with a website whose security seems naive at best, the back end functionality is questionable, and the only source of support is half a world away physically and on the other side of the galaxy in terms of actual accountability in the case of errors or breaches, it’s time to really think long and hard what sort of functions American corporations should be allowed to off-shore?
I’m thinking that anything having to do with sensitive private data on consumers is one of those things that the answer to “should we off-shore this?” should be an emphatic HELL NO.