News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me with legal action. Parent comment

Re:I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me wi... by simias on Thursday November 09, 2017 @07:56AM (#15661960)
That's my experience as well. As long as all you want is return faulty/not-needed-after-all articles then Amazon is great. Never ever had a hiccup in 10 years and I order a lot of stuff.

However if your request is a little more specific and doesn't fit neatly in whatever scripts they're using then it's a bit of a mess. I mainly use amazon.fr so I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly. In the end I could see that they kept reverting to the script and where a bit lost when I tried to steer things away from it.

I just wanted to complain about a transporter who kept failing to deliver my parcels so it wasn't a big deal but I think it would've been pretty difficult to interact with this (nonetheless very kind) person if I had something a little trickier and more important to figure out with them.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me wi... by Aaargh20318 on Thursday November 09, 2017 @08:08AM (#15662036)
> I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly.

That's the one advantage of living in a tiny country (the Netherlands) that speaks a language hardly anyone else does. It's impossible to outsource customer support to low-wages countries because you simply can't find anyone there who speaks Dutch.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me wi... by drfuchs on Thursday November 09, 2017 @09:48AM (#15662797)
There are lots of low-wage Afrikaans speakers, and Wikipedia says there "is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between" Dutch and Afrikaans. So there must be some other explanation for why you get native Dutch speakers for customer support?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me wi... by Aaargh20318 on Thursday November 09, 2017 @10:54AM (#15663394)
Afrikaans is not similar enough for customer support roles. If you hear Afrikaans as a Dutch person you can sort of get the meaning of what they are saying if they speak slow enough, but it's not like it's just a dialect.

It's a bit like the difference between English and Jamaican Creole.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me wi... by nradov on Thursday November 09, 2017 @09:58AM (#15662882)
Actually there are companies doing that type of outsourcing in Serbia. Wages there are still low and they have enough employees who can speak even the smaller European languages.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me wi... by astura on Thursday November 09, 2017 @09:21AM (#15662555)
I suppose the wages in the Dutch Caribbean must be fairly good then.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I bought a Switch from Nintendo and they threatened me wi... by Aaargh20318 on Thursday November 09, 2017 @09:40AM (#15662724)
I think the main industry there is tourism. If there are any Dutch speaking callcenters there they aren't very common, I've never encountered it in real life (you'd instantly notice by the accent).
[ Parent | on HN ]