Why the heck do American companies do this? I despise dealing with people that work from a script, and only that script, and can't do anything along the lines of TRUE, HONEST customer service.

This is not a case of "hiring foreigners to do the job Americans don't want to do". It's CSR work, which plenty of people are willing to do. I will avoid any company that has their CSR's in India, if at all possible.

Exporting customer service, and scripting it for God's sake, it's just stupid!! I guess because international business is so less complicated these days, that a boycott doesn't carry the weight it once did. So it's easier to screw the customer, and go "oh well" when they cancel, or vow to never do service again with that company.

Unbelievable.

Root story:

Booked a trip via Travelocity, with a flight departing vegas and heading home at 7 pm. Get the email confirmation and bam, the flight info has 1 am flight. The refund of my money back to my credit card will now take 30 days, per travelocity, and there is no renewing the vacation time (my wife's). So no vacation for my family this year.

Lies told by Travelocity:

- Please wait on hold for 2 minutes (took 15) x 5
- Please wait on hold for 10 minutes (took an hour) x 2
- It's not Travelocity's fault that the flight booking was incorrect
- It's not Travelocity's fault that we can't refund your money sooner.

The worst part is, I don't believe the money will ever come back. A check at RipOffReport.com shows similar stories, and people have never gotten their money back. I wish I would've checked that first! Apparently travelocity has a no refunds policy, that credit card companies tolerate. This whole thing puts a major damper on small business websites. How can you trust buying via credit card on the net, after an experience like that?

It amazes me that anyone could think that they can provide "Customer Service" when they're thousands of miles from the problem AND the solution.

Give me the old fashioned personal touch any day.

As far as a script - almost all support people do this. I ran into the same thing with Frontier Airlines actually.

I needed to book a flight for Mexico by 10p. I booked it online but I could not get them to show my already pre-booked cancelled flight that I had. I called, but after waiting on hold for 20 minutes and getting disconnected, I decided to deal with it in the morning.

The first guy said there was nothing he could do. I told him I wanted to speak with a supervisor. He asked why? I told him because I was not happy. There would probably not be another time in this year that my $300 credit would be used since most flights were under $200. He said he would waive the $100 transfer fee. Of course I still was not happy.

I asked him to cancel the flight I made last night & re-book it. He could not do that, he replied. So at this point I was really upset and I said use common sense and customer service and pretend you do not work for a corporation. Pretend that you do not have to go by that script and let's fix this. He said he could not do anything.

I ended up calling him a moronic corporate imbecile, talking to his supervisor, getting my flight cancelled, and rebooked with my credit.

Anytime I have to call support personnel and I am not getting my way, I just say thank you, hang up and call back. It takes time but sometimes it will work.

Don't use any outfit's services where they are not in the same country as you. In any case, an India Times news report last year said that a leading Indian security expert said that it was NOT AT ALL POSSIBLE to do background checks on staff at call centers. Staff routinely steal credit card numbers and other ID detail and sell them. Indian call center managers say everything is under control but recently thousands of UK credit card numbers were stolen, yet again.

Ugh. I know from personal experience that most support centers do work from loose scripts. I used to do technical support (Norton AntiVirus, Norton Internet Security, Virus Removal) for Symantec and then got laid off since they decided that they would outsource overseas. Some of us were put in a position where we had to train our replacements. It was somewhat of a nightmare.

So that's why I can't get any help from Symnatec! lol

It is all about money. For the cost of one US customer service rep you can get 10 reps in India. Many of the on line travel companies work with small profit margins so they need to save money where ever possible.