Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

23 Oct 2003, 18:34 p.m.

Two Stories of Customer Service

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2003 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

  1. "Hi, this is Sumana with Salon Premium. What can I do for you?"

    I looked up his information. As I waited for it to appear, he asked, "Are you in India now?"

    I slowly replied (in my born-and-bred US accent) that no, I am in San Francisco, to which he said, "Same difference."

    Note that, were I actually in an Indian call center, I would fake a white name. Also, maybe this is why Salon hired me - by using an Indian for customer service, the management fools investors into thinking Salon has cheaply outsourced the work to overseas!

  2. I assured a subscriber that I had emailed him a week prior. After digging through his email, he found the message, and explained that he had deleted it because my name looks like a spam name.