Personally I have had no problems "deciphering" a Scottish accent as transmitted through a normal phone line. It may be because I come from a region with its own indecipherable accent. Fortunately(?) I don't make a very good Wurzel impersonator
In regards to call centres the issue may be technical. I would hope that a company like EE (especially with its new parent) would spend the money to use decent, high quality equipment and connections to the phone network (hell, why not use HD voice!). What some companies do is to use extreme amounts of compression over a very ropey VoIP link. That means echo, huge latency and crap sounding audio.
I had to deal with HP enterprise recently (the bit of HP that makes servers and stuff). They insisted on dealing with my issue by phone, but I couldn't work out what they were saying. This was nothing to with the fact that it was a foreign call centre, and totally down to the use of sub standard (probably VoIP) gear.
In regards to call centres the issue may be technical. I would hope that a company like EE (especially with its new parent) would spend the money to use decent, high quality equipment and connections to the phone network (hell, why not use HD voice!). What some companies do is to use extreme amounts of compression over a very ropey VoIP link. That means echo, huge latency and crap sounding audio.
I had to deal with HP enterprise recently (the bit of HP that makes servers and stuff). They insisted on dealing with my issue by phone, but I couldn't work out what they were saying. This was nothing to with the fact that it was a foreign call centre, and totally down to the use of sub standard (probably VoIP) gear.



