The joys of working for a company that bought into globalization and off-shoring much of its work: meetings often start at 8:00 pm over bad cell connections and Radio Shack headsets with impenetrable accents.
I am so happy to be retired.
Well, I don’t speak. So there’s that issue.
My fix, ask my young adult daughter call them for me, if I can’t get on a chat with CS. She’s always happy to do it.
Another thing, don’t call them from your job or your car or where you’ll be interupted. Get in a quiet area.
Don’t be afraid to ask them to repeat it, often. If it continues to be a problem they will, by default send you to another person.
I just apologize, assert that were we in person, I’m certain it would be fine, but I have trouble over the phone, I do hope they can understand! They always do, and readily pass me off to another.
I used to travel a lot to SEAsia, 20yrs or more ago, often on Japan AirLine. Then, as now, no one gets a forward facing job without impeccable English skills. Every single person, perfect pronunciation. And then they would start the safety talk. It was unendingly entrancing to me. I knew what was coming and, every, single, time, it was amazing. The first two sentences, were perfection itself. But after that things began to slowly shift, no doubt from repetition. The individual words were still being said accurately, but the cadence had slowly but fully shifted to a more Japanese rhythm.
I was always intrigued and listened rapt to the entire speech. At the end, boom, right back to the right rhythm. It was amazing, to me, every single time.
Well, I spoke at length with a very nice lady from tech support. I had to ask her to repeat multiple times, and she had to fix something on her end that made it sound like everything was on a tape loop.
And….they still haven’t fixed the problems, still haven’t admitted that the problems are on their end, and I get to go thru the whole process again tomorrow after they “do some checking.”
I think, if the call goes on longer tomorrow, I’ll ask if there’s some way we can turn this into some form of instant messaging that I can type from my laptop.
The majority of the time I’m dealing with a thick accent it’s an Indian national who happens to be one of my employees. Usually we’re discussing the benefit plans and they’re asking for clarification for how the medical plans work. What ends up happening is I ask them to repeat themselves. A lot. I find I also have to repeat myself frequently to make sure I’m understood. Though with practice I find it’s a lot easier for me to understand a thick Indian accent than it was five or six years ago.
In the context of my work place, it’s my job to help employees so that makes it easier. And on a personal level, I appreciate anyone who comes to the United States and is making the effort to speak English, so it’s hard for me to get angry though I’ve sometimes been frustrated. I remember one employee who I had to explain in three different ways they couldn’t add their mother to their employer’s medical plan.
In the context of me being the customer, I get a little angry when the person on the phone doesn’t speak English clearly. Though I get a kick out of someone with a thick accent telling me their name is Gary or Paul. I just muddle through as best I can.
Years ago, I rang the ATO (our equivalent of the IRS) to make what I thought was a simple enquiry about how to fill in one portion of my tax return. Although I consider myself fairly adept at understanding various accents, I couldn’t understand what the person I was speaking to was saying. After a few attempts I politely asked her if she could transfer me to her supervisor. She did and I explained that I could not understand what the operator was saying. The supervisor offered no solution and berated me for my “racist” request to talk to someone else. I hung up on him, rang back and got a different frontline operator and had my question answered.
No discussion of difficult customer service encounters due to language barriers is complete without a cite to the seminal work on the topic:
I once translated for two friends who couldn’t understand each other much … but we were all speaking English! 
One friend was from Newcastle (Geordie - Wikipedia accent), the other from Glasgow dialect - Wikipedia
Right, Indians! A friend of mine travelled all the way from India to visit Atlanta, Georgia. When she ordered lunch in this city, it turned out that the cashier at McDonald’s, for some reason, did not have a classical BBC accent! The way she dealt with this accent that she could not understand was, politely ask the person to repeat themselves. She still could only barely understand a word the person was saying, not to mention the quaint regional vocabulary, but eventually she got the drift.
I’m usually good with accents, and this happened to me yesterday, talking to my employer’s help desk. I wonder if my hearing is going. 
She had a thick accent and unusual grammar. I asked her to repeat stuff a lot. At one point, i asked if she could call me back because i thought the connection was bad, and she called back on Teams, which was a little better. At some point, she switched to chat, and that was a lot better.
The thing is, based on her answers, she didn’t understand me, either, but she didn’t admit it. That made communication extremely difficult. Switching to chat (essentially texting) helped a lot, and that’s when i realized it wasn’t just an accent, it was also extremely non-standard grammar. Her name looked Indian, and that surprised me, as in my experience, it’s East Asians who struggle with English grammar. My experience with Indians is that they sometimes have a thick accept but usually have excellent English grammar.
Anyway, what i did was:
- Ask her to repeat herself
- Repeated my question, in different words
- Switched to a cleaner phone connection (and it’s a little random from call to call hour good the connection will be)
- Switched to text
And finally, because it turned out that the problem wasn’t just language, it was also that she had absolutely no clue about my technical issue, i got escalated to a different person who understood the question i was asking. It turned out it mostly wasn’t a language problem, it’s just that the language barrier was heavy enough that it took me a while to realize that.
I have done a lot of English-to-English translations. I used to help a Russian co-worker deal with local merchants, and I’ve helped square dancers understand a Japanese caller (calling in English). This is why my troubles yesterday have me wondering about my hearing.
I sometimes have a little difficulty understanding some accents, but generally not so much that I ask to speak with someone else. I did have a conversation a few years ago with tech support (regarding a damaged Amazon order, I think) during which the tech support person was having trouble understanding me, although I could grasp what she was saying. I speak English with a midwestern American accent and proper grammar. I don’t have that ‘orl’ for ‘oil’, ‘zink’ for ‘sink’, or ‘bub’ for ‘bulb’ rural Missouri accent like my older relatives. I assume I should be no harder to understand than a major network news anchor. However, the tech support person was having so much difficulty that she needed me to spell things for her, and she requested I use alpha bravo tango designations for my letters. She seemed frustrated with me for not knowing the NATO phonetic alphabet. (I had to Google it to even know that is what it is called.) She transferred me to someone else who had no difficulty understanding me, and we got the issue fixed quickly.
Sometimes the accent I’m having trouble understanding is somebody most likely born and lived all their life in the USA – somewhere in the South with a heavy Southern accent.
I had a funny IRL accent-adjacent misunderstanding a few nights ago.
I’d gone out to happy hour alone and happened to sit at the bar beside a woman also alone. I’m generic white American & so’s she. About the same age. We yakked for ~90 minutes and didn’t seem to be having any accent problems. Turns out we both live nearby and know the area fairly well. Which has lots of eateries and drinkeries within easy walking distance.
Once HH ended I suggested we walk a couple blocks to the “tapas joint”. She heard “topless joint”. She wasn’t so much miffed at this off-color suggestion as just confused. She was pretty sure there isn’t a topless joint near here (and she’s right; there’s not). I repeated “tapas” and she repeated “topless?” But I wasn’t quite hearing the L, so I thought she was saying “tapas?” back to me.
We went around about 3 times before I finally spelled “tapas - T A P A S.” “Ooohhhh”. The walk was nice and the tapas were yummy.
It ended right there, but you can see how that conversation could have been badly derailed over an “L”. 
I once ran into exactly that misunderstanding on a work trip, when one coworker suggested we decamp to a nearby tapas bar, and another coworker heard “topless”.
Hilarity ensued, as a topless bar would not have appropriate.
I think I’ll switch to “tapas place”. It seems like maybe “tapas bar” and “tapas joint” both carry a much larger risk of turning topless. 
I often struggle with this too, especially heavier British-Indian accents — and that’s despite having worked with several Indian colleagues over the years. Usually I just make an excuse and call back. Like LSLGuy said, no need to insult them or be mean about it, but if it’s a genuine hurdle to communication, you don’t need to pretend like it’s fine, either. Just disengage however you can, like “I’m sorry, something came up and I have to go. I will call back later” and you’ll probably get a different agent.
I currently work in customer service and talk to English speakers from around the world, with a variety of accents, many of whom I have trouble understanding. In online Zoom/Google Meet video calls, at least you can turn on the automatic subtitles and read them. That works very, very well; they’re often trained on the accents of many speakers, and have way more exposure to different forms of English than many of us do. But of course, you can’t always invite a customer service rep into such a video call.
On many modern phones, I think you also have a similar option, though I’m not sure how well it does with accents compared to the cloud stuff. The feature is called Live Captions (and it’s built into recent iPhones and Androids). Might be worth a shot? You end up having to put them on speakerphone so you can read what they’re saying, but it might help. It basically functions as live subtitles, like you’re watching a live TV broadcast with closed captions on.
There is also an older-school way of doing this… depending on how you feel about a slight(?) mis-use of federally-subsidized telecom services… the FCC, under the ADA, provides funding for telecom relay services for the deaf and hard of hearing. One of those services is “IP relay”, in which you (as the caller/recipient) can use a webpage/phone app/dedicated device to type text into a box, like online chat. That chat goes to a human operator, who then reads it out loud to the person on the other end (the customer service person), after explaining the situation to them, something like “…I am an operator for caller identifying themselves as Soandso, and I will repeat what you say to them in text form. Please allow for a slight delay between each message.” Then that operator will type it back to you so you see it as chat, and you can type back your response, etc. You never have to actually hear anybody — it’s all text. One example of this is the T-Mobile Relay service. I believe these are free/federally funded and open to all, though they were designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing (which many of us are). The operator may or may not have better luck understanding accents than you do, or they might just text you back with “(heavy accent, indecipherable, clarifying)” etc. It may be a last resort if all else fails.
(When I was a kid, I used to use those services to make prank calls… because the operator is legally obligated to repeat whatever you ask them to… I’m sorry, operator person! I was 14!)
Sure. It is not that there is a particular problem with Americans— a mad accent could also come from a Kiwi, Scot, etc. The point is that it is more likely in native English speakers than in someone who painstakingly learned “standard” pronunciation from tapes.
There’s actually a new movie thriller based on this concept opening tomorrow (I saw it Monday) called “Relay.” Much of the film is spent doing exactly that, typing into a box that the operator then reads to the other person on the line.
Two things I’ve done when I can’t understand the other person. If it’s a difficult foreign accent, I will ask to be transferred to someone stateside. Frequently, I get a native English speaker and can proceed. Another thing I’ve asked for when the accent is not the problem but simple clarity is - I’ve asked them to reposition their microphone. I realize that headsets that many of them use tend to get moved inadvertently and while they think they’re being perfectly clear, they may be too far from the mic to be heard clearly. That often works.