Offshoring UK Jobs - Is it really working?

Ok, first off I don't know anyone who works in call centres or know anyone who does. This is just my point of view from someone outside looking in.

A large number of the biggest companies in the UK are moving all their call centres to places like India. I do know that the savings can be 40% or more but I don't think they fully realise just how bad their service has become.

I don't know if any of you are aware but I do callouts for software problems on computers. Since the larger ISP's moved their call centres to India my business has started growing. The reason is simply that when people phone the call centres for help they can no longer clearly understand the person on the other end of the phone - or the person on the other end of the phone cannot understand the regional accent of the person phoning for help. Or the most common now which is trying to explain what's happening on your computer to cause the faults when the person on the other end of the phone doesn't know what the techy words like proxy, port numbers etc mean.

Now I grew up in London and 80% of my friends were Indian and over the course of my school life I used to go round to their houses to play. While my friends english were quite good their parents often were not. Over the years I learnt to understand the words that were not quite spoken clearly and I thought I could have a decent converstation with all of my friends parents. When we moved into Newton Road, Torquay 6 years ago our next door neighbours were Indian and I could still hold up a good conversation with them (Although their English was good). But with the people working in these call centres even I have trouble understanding them and whereas I used to happily dovote time answering surveys for BT I no longer do because the converstions go on much longer than they ever did before and the stress levels rise because I keep having to say "Sorry, can you repeat that".

Now forward to these call centres. I have had to phone up these call centres on behalf of my clients and what used to take me a few minutes to solve now may not be solved at all. The main problem for me is I know exactly what the faults may be but the people in the call centres may not know what I'm talking about because they haven't been told what the words I'm saying mean. If I just phoned up and slowly and clearly said "no dial tone" they will have this written down for them. But when you've already checked all the very basic problems like is the phone line connected or if the modem working ok then you now run a very high risk on the person on the other end of the phone having no clue at all what you're talking about or what can be done about it.

I would say anyone with a computer knowledge mid-range and up will now have a lot of trouble on the phone trying to explain what certain terms means. When people phone support centres they are already stressed so surely this added communication problem can only heighten the stress levels?

Am I wrong here?