Hello There!  I'm Matt Chadwick at the business desk and this week I'd like to discuss a bit about those call centers in India.
For the past few years many large corporations have been shifting their call center operations to India because they are telling us all that they are doing this in order to reduce their overhead costs.  This may be fine from their point of view but I along with thousands of experts across America and millions of very upset and unhappy Americans are seeing this quite differently.  For starters  Let me put forth some very sobering facts and I'll let you be the judge.
First, these call centers in India are being staffed by employees who don't speak English very well as English is their second language. 
Second, these folks in India employ very different ways of marketing their companies to us.  They are abrupt, rude, and don't know very much about how to interact with us as they seem to be very unaware of our culture let alone our geographical areas.  I'll give you two examples to back up my opinion.  They phone late at night asking or rather demanding that you sign up with their companies for such services as long distance  connections and when you try to be polite to them they keep demanding and demanding and finally you end up hanging up on them.  Then when they phone they ask for the owner of the phone and if you're a female answering the phone they are extremely rude to you as if they would prefer not to speak to a woman.  Then they would even dare to phone on Sundays and when you tell them to please leave you alone they become very belligerent.
When I refer to them not knowing much about our geographical areas I say this because I recently had an experience where I phoned IBM to get the number of a friend.  The call center in India received the call and when I told them that I was seeking the number of my friend in Austin Texas they had no clue where Austin Texas was and I had to spell Both Austin and Texas.  I spent over 10 minutes attempting to get this number and at the end I had to hang up because the call taker could not help me.
In addition to this many of these call center staff members are woefully weak in their knowledge of the different products and services that they are supposed to know about.  You phone looking for info on a product and these poor call takers have no idea what you're talking about.
So what we have here is a picture of these call centers in India providing woefully inadequate customer service because:  They cannot speak English efficiently enough to communicate or help us, their knowledge of the products and services that they're supposed to know about is almost zero, and their customer savvy or lack of it is a big problem.  Whereas these large corporations are telling us that they are doing this to cut their costs, they are falling down on the job when it comes to customers service.  There is also another very important point here and that is:  With many corporations such as IBM, Sprint, AT&T, and others moving their call center operations outside of North America, they have affectively taken away jobs from millions of Americans.  Persons such as special needs persons, those who do not possess the necessary qualifications to land those high paying jobs, part-timers, plus so many more.  They have taken away opportunities of employment for millions of Americans who need these types of jobs in order to make ends meet as they say.
It's time for us to speak up about this particular issue.  We must not settle for second rate customer service and most importantly we should not allow these corporate giants to get away with this.  What really gets me annoyed is when these corporations proclaim their willingness and readiness to help our economy but in essence what they are doing is selling jobs at cut rates to others rather than to their own.  They are taking their call center services to India and paying next to nothing for Indian labor but in reality they are paying for shamefully poor customer service that will eventually come back to bite them.