I found this poll on the yahooXtra home page today, asking ‘Do you avoid companies that outsource their call centre staff?’.

As you know, this is a topic that makes me hot under the collar with large companies preferring to outsource without understanding the implications to their customers and their satisfaction with the service and business.

So far, over 13, 821 people have voted in the poll with 9805 or 71% of respondents saying people they do avoid outsourced call centres. Ouch! Of course I am delighted that I am not alone in feeling this way.

The majority of outsourced call centres are offshore, which means language difficulties, poor Kiwi pronunciation and a lack of general knowledge of New Zealand landmarks. This causes customer dissatisfaction and frustration.

I know it’s a small poll, but once again the customer is trying to tell companies something… sooner or later they will listen. On the plus side, there are now a half dozen large local companies advertising on national TV and media that their call centres are New Zealand based. Yeehaa – those companies are listening! 

I’m going to keep an eye on the poll over the next day or so, purely for my entertainment.

If you want to vote, click here