> I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly.
That's the one advantage of living in a tiny country (the Netherlands) that speaks a language hardly anyone else does. It's impossible to outsource customer support to low-wages countries because you simply can't find anyone there who speaks Dutch.
There are lots of low-wage Afrikaans speakers, and Wikipedia says there "is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between" Dutch and Afrikaans. So there must be some other explanation for why you get native Dutch speakers for customer support?
Afrikaans is not similar enough for customer support roles. If you hear Afrikaans as a Dutch person you can sort of get the meaning of what they are saying if they speak slow enough, but it's not like it's just a dialect.
It's a bit like the difference between English and Jamaican Creole.
Actually there are companies doing that type of outsourcing in Serbia. Wages there are still low and they have enough employees who can speak even the smaller European languages.
I think the main industry there is tourism. If there are any Dutch speaking callcenters there they aren't very common, I've never encountered it in real life (you'd instantly notice by the accent).
That's the one advantage of living in a tiny country (the Netherlands) that speaks a language hardly anyone else does. It's impossible to outsource customer support to low-wages countries because you simply can't find anyone there who speaks Dutch.