The thread on the Nebraska farmers broadcaster accent got me thinking about the comprehensibility of different English language accents relative to each other.
Here in Ireland if you make a call to a call centre you’ll often be connected to someone based locally but a lot of call centres seem to be based in the north-east of England, occasionally Scotland. There are also some that seem to be based in India or at least are staffed by people from that country. A lot of adverts on telly now trumpet the fact they have UK or Irish based call centre staff.
The last time I was in Co. Donegal my friend pointed out a major local employer, an American firm. They have a call centre there apparently because the mainly American customer base responds well to the local accent.
I have to admit that occasionally non-local accents flummox me a bit, although quality of the line seems to me the bigger issue.
So other Anglophones, where are the people based who pick up your calls? Have you ever called a call centre and not been able to comprehend the person on the other end of the line?
Could be anywhere, really. And yes, I’ve gotten through to people I couldn’t understand, usually not native speakers of English. Some of the bigger organizations (Best Buy, for instance) have call centers scattered all over the place, more for time zone issues than language (so that whoever you’re calling is awake…). Even bigger organizations (IBM) put all their eggs in one basket and have one call center, and just make people work different shifts, so they get three shifts out of one call center and don’t have to pay anybody overtime.
Mostly Australia, in my experience. Occasionally overseas. Sometimes I get an operator with an accent (New Zealand say), but I don’t know whether the call centre is in New Zealand, or it’s based locally and just happens to employ New Zealand staff.
Yes. A couple of years ago I rang the Hertz call centre. Normally that gets you local operators, but this one time I got somewhere in America. The operator and I had terrible trouble understanding each other.
This is one of the biggest gripes Americans have with corporations - overseas call centers. If you call your financial entity such as an insurance company or bank, or the phone company, odds are, you’ll be speaking to someone in Alabang, Philippines, or Hyderabad, India.
Polite to a fault, but often difficult to understand, and a lot of people can’t get past the “Dey took our jobs!” mentality.
A while back, Dell was effectively forced by its corporate-level customers to bring the dedicated tech support back to America as their customers were severely torqued at spending tens of thousands on servers then having to deal with a first-level script reader asking if they rebooted.
I read something a couple of months back about how 1.6% of the Swedish workforce worked in Call Centers. So it seems to me that if you live in northern Europe, you’ll probably be talking to them. (I know, I know, they aren’t this way at all, but picture the Swedish Chef doing tech support…)
Apple used to have a couple of call centers in India and one in the Phillipines back when I worked for them. Now my understanding is that pretty much all of their people are scattered over the US, and they’ve greatly expanded their support staff.
The place I worked up until a couple of months ago employed somewhere around 400 people for several different clients. I know a few people who have gone from there to work in to call centers for Comcast, Best Buy and Select Comfort.
As above, it’s that “Wait a minute, I paid how much for this product and I’m getting someone calling himself “Roger” who may speak English but can’t do more than read a fucking script?” that totally ruins a customer experience. Even when they can do more, as I learned from experience, there are a lot of people in this country who will absolutely refuse to speak to anyone they suspect is not American.
Knew a girl from Donegal. A speaking voice that could make time stand still, but a face that could stop a clock.
I often ask where they are, prefacing it with an explanation that, being older, I’m still amazed that you can call anywhere in the world without shouting. Some are in Darjeeling, some in Mexico, and lots in the US, including just a few miles from here. As for Iowa and Nebraska accents I get some from somewhere between Council Bluffs and Omaha. You can tell them by their bubbling noises.
I’ve had a bad week, had to call IT support (Pune, India), my health insurer (Rockland, Mass.) and the administrator of our employee stock plan (somewhere, New Jersey).
I never think to ask. If it’s someone in these isles I can tell by the accent typically. The next time I hear a non-Ukian/Ireland accent I’m going to ask. I bet it turns out they’re within 5 miles of here though.
If you call one of our ISP’s, or a similar company- even computer company, in Australia you are likely to get India. However it is also increasingly common to get the Phillipines or Malaysia.
I often wonder who we used to get pissed off with before there were call centres.
I called my telephone company four times last week and got someone with an Australian accent once. Judging by the line quality at least one of the accented operators was in an overseas call centre, but I don’t know for sure (I suspect all three were overseas). For what it’s worth, although the three accented operators at least left decent and detailed notes on my account, it took the Aussie girl to identify where two of them had misinformed me, arrange for their promises to be honoured anyway, and tidy up the loose ends. This is my typical experience with overseas call centres; they are useless for anything beyond the basics and you’ll end up calling back until you get an Aussie who will instantly fix everything.
I worked at a call center for a fortune 500 company. We were in Ohio. The guy that ended up sitting behind me was from Bangladesh. He spoke very good English, but whenever people suspected him being in India, they could often not be convinced he was not.
I take calls all day from foreign people in the US, that doesn’t mean they speak any English though.
You need to be able to speak the official language of a country you intend to live in. If that seems absurd, don’t go there.
There are other reasons for splitting operations up among several different call centers. A single call center means you’re scewed if there’s something like a power failure, a phone line get’s knocked down or satelite dished damaged, or a natural diaster strikes.
At work, it seems perhaps 70% of the call centers I reach are located nearer the other coast, in Québec or Ontario. (A much bigger pool of people who are fluent in both official languages.)
I worked for a while in an “evil, job stealing call center” which was located in Pakistan. We were specifically told to avoid certain turns of the phrase and pronunciations and to adopt a neutral as possible accent for this exact reason. And adopt “western” names as well for the purposes of speaking to the customer. Its amazing how different people can react just on that. I know one person who used the name “Francios”. He never got complaints about being “foreign” for some reason.
Why is this a problem for Americans, denizens of the most ethnically diverse nation on earth? I have always found this really really bizarre. Why does the accent of the person you are speaking to matter more than the efficient resolution of your problem?
Supposedly there are a crapload of call centers in Brownsville, TX. My company’s 4 call centers are located in Illinois, Texas, Indiana, and Connecticut. We work with EXL in India for a lot of things, but they don’t do anything that’s directly customer-facing.
Our IT support is outsourced to India. I have no problem with the people, just with the policies they are asked to implement. After a while, you learn that the word escalate should be mentioned three times in the first call, otherwise they will give you the lowest priority, no matter what your problem is.
The only thing that bugs me is when they use fake names. A few weeks ago, a guy with an obvious Indian accent answered the phone and told me his name was Benjamin Franklin. it cracked me up.
