Why M&S made me feel like a racist

I like M&S Direct, the chain store's on-line service, because whenever I've used it, it has worked really well...up until now.  I sent friends in Scotland some wine for Xmas, and having been away for a couple of days found two messages on my answering machine from two women in one of the M&S call centres.  The problem was that neither of the messages were comprehensible - the women's accents were impenetrable, but I did manage to catch the 'phone number.

I called, and the person who answered struggled to understand anything that I said to her, and her English was so bad that I became more and more baffled, and then progressively more annoyed - what should have been a two-minute call to resolve a minor delivery issue, became a 20-minute saga.  Let's not beat about the bush: she was of Asian origin and spoke lousy English with an extremely strong accent.  Had this been a cockney or a Brummie, or someone from Northern Ireland, or any of the other British accents that can sometimes be difficult, I wouldn't have had a problem complaining, but the fact that she was Asian caused me to pause before I lost the plot.  Would she, and the manager I eventually spoke to, think that I was complaining because she was Asian...was I running the risk of being branded a racist?

How sad it is that such a thought should even cross my mind, but I know lots of people who hate dealing with call centres based overseas, simply because they've had bad experiences, similar to mine.

In the end I did complain, and her supervisor promised to go off and listen to the call.  He called me back, apologised on behalf of M&S, telling me that he struggled to understand what was going on, and made a 'gesture' of a financial nature to recompense me for my inconvenience.

Call centres are, sadly, a fact of life, and I have sympathy for the people who work in them and who suffer abuse from unhappy customers, but surely the very first criterion for employing someone in a call centre has to be that their English is up to scratch?  I couldn't care less about the ethnic origins of the call centre person I speak to, but they'd better be able to communicate with me in a sensible manner!