Santander gives Bombay the banking duck

Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

So it's finally dawned on Santander, the Spanish bank with three branches in every town, that Indian call centres are the bane of every bank customer's life. Not because they are staffed by Indians but because the satellite phones don't work well and it is all "what did you say?" and "I didn't get that" and because of the differences in understanding language nuances.

Chief executive Ana Botin said, "This is what our customers have told us is the most important factor in terms of the satisfaction with the bank, and we have listened to them and decided to bring all our retail call centres back from India." Good! So it's goodbye Bombay, hello Burnley.

Pity the bank that used to be a listening one still carries on with long distance communications. They killed the griffin and a frightful resurrected dodo came into being.

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Tata for that!

Tata has finally launched the world's cheapest car. A vehicle in its basic model has no airbags, no air conditioning, no radio, or power steering. So I hope nobody sitting in an Indian call centre buys one of those. We can't have them arriving at work even more hassled and harried than they already are. However, Tata have more luxurious versions available for future purchases. These will be much more suited to an Indian call centre worker.

"Hello, my name's George. I am speaking to you today about a government scheme to insulate your house. Are you the owner of the house?" "Did you come to work in a top of the range Tata Nano Car?" "What?" "Did you?" "No!" "Sorry can't speak to you then, as you may be hot and bothered and I don't wish to become hot and bothered either!".

Could be the end of Indian call centres as we know them or a brand new beginning!

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Long distance information, give me.....!!

New Year has arrived and the Indian call centres have cranked up into top gear. I've just had three on the line in quick succession. One trying to flog a mobile phone scheme, another talking about my house in detail, and the last preposterously suggesting that the British Government wanted to help me, should I have "any unsecured debts"!

Most of them, when told that I'm not interested, hang on in a similar vein to the drowning man in Tony Hancock's Radio Ham ("Mayday, mayday, please, please, I am sinking in the Indian Ocean!") only to be advised he'd be better off talking to someone better prepared.

The thing that gets me is that these call centres seem to be badly linked up to the phones. Mostly it is like talking to a person in a drain. Progress? Of a sort, I suppose.

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Call centres in India disrupted - good news or bad?

Internet services have been disrupted in large parts of the Middle East and India following damage to two undersea cables in the Mediterranean. Apparently call centres in India can't call anybody because their internet instructions are all out of whack! So we could have a week free from persistent phone calls from people speaking in perfect 1940's Standard English. "Sorry, what was that again?".

That's the good news. It also means that bloggers from the Middle East are mainly offline. That puts the likes of Osama Bin Laden in the isolation cave, which is good, but prevents the truth tellers from getting online, which is bad.

The bad news also is that trade and commerce will be badly affected. Not what we want in these global credit crunch days. Egypt's Telecommunications Ministry said it would probably take several days for internet services to return to normal following the disruption on Wednesday. Emergency teams were trying to find alternative communication routes, including satellites. The ministry's Rafaat Hindy said, "Despite this being an international cable affecting many Gulf and Arab countries, we are closest to it and so we have a lot of responsibility."

"We are working as fast as we can." He should come and see the guys at Network Rail!

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