A person’s background has no bearing on their ability to handle a customer’s complaint, writes the TIO’s Training Officer, Monica Clements.

Every so often, I pick up the phone to hear: ”Yes, this is my reference number ... yes 'such and such' is handling my complaint but I don’t want to speak with that person—they’ve got an accent.”
”Well”, I say to them mildly in my best ‘strine’, ”everyone has an accent at the TIO ...”*

Like most other workplaces in Australia, the TIO is culturally and linguistically diverse. Of our approximately 80 staff, just
some of the countries either they or their parents came from are Australia, Bosnia, Chile, Croatia, England, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Sri Lanka, South Africa, the USA and Wales.

It doesn’t go down too well with us when a customer tells us they don’t want to speak with one of our colleagues because they “have an accent.”

Not only is it offensive to us, but it is also irrelevant. We are here to handle complaints about telecommunications. We focus on the complaint at hand, not where the person who is handling the complaint came from. The people who work at the TIO are employed because they know what they are on about. They can understand what a complaint is about. They can give good advice to a caller about the way to move forward with their complaint. They know how to keep in contact with both a company and their customer at each stage of a complaint.

It doesn’t stop here...

We also get calls from people who say they do not want to speak to staff in overseas call centres, ”I don’t want to talk to that person; they’re in India.”

The TIO would not classify this type of call as a “complaint”. The TIO does not handle complaints about the decisions that companies make about running their business - including where to run their business - unless those decisions have unfair consequences for customers.

By an unfair consequence we mean one that changes the existing arrangements between a customer and their company. It is not the TIO’s experience that the practice of moving the customer service part of a business offshore changes the agreements/contracts between a customer and their company. More importantly, customers have the same rights to pursue disagreements about their arrangements after a move offshore as before. They also have the same rights to information privacy.

It should be noted that, as always, the TIO would register a complaint about not being able to get a matter understood, recognised, recorded, taken further, or handled by a team leader/supervisor/manager. A call about not getting good customer service is a complaint, wherever the person responsible for that customer service is based.

* 'Strine' is a colloquial word for the Australian accent, based on the way “Australian” sounds when said with an Australian accent.