It’s not too unusual to see companies use oversees customer service departments to handle inquiries and such. Business wise one thing that I have noticed that a lot of companies or online freelancers do nowadays is that they use avatars of people who you would typically think would be able to speak English very well when in reality they can’t.
So this was an interesting example I saw of crowdfunding project of the business essentially not comprehending what the customer was saying which was pretty consistent with many responses. As you can see in the screenshot the person wrote the following:
“This is getting ridiculous! It is 3 months past when you thought you’d ship, 4 months past the original ship date, and now 2 weeks past the promised ship date. I am beginning to think I funded someone’s trip to Fiji.”
Now for most of us we can easily see that he is implying that he feels someone has scammed him out of his money where instead of using the funds to deliver a product the company took the money and ran away with it. But the customer service’s response was kind of funny as a result of not comprehending the question very well. As you can see they replied with the following:
“Customer care will assist you and shipping will follow up asap. Enjoy Fiji and please tag smove in some of your photos/videos from it!”
So as you can see that person read it as if the customer was going to Fiji. Again, from what I saw there were quite a few lost in translation moments like these and to my knowledge the company is based in China somewhere. Either that or they really wanted to reply say sarcastically to the person.
Kind of makes me wonder why if a company wants to do business in a foreign country that they wouldn’t seriously invest in people who can communicate and relate fluently to native speakers. I know it will save most company’s money upfront, but the blunders that it can create like these can probably cost a company more in the long run.