textualdeviance (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
textualdeviance) wrote2009-11-28 10:34 am
textualdeviance) wrote2009-11-28 10:34 am
Entry tags:
Communication breakdown
Being a bleeding-heart pinko progressive hippie sort, it pains me to have to complain about this, but...
A plea to all companies that use call centers to serve a primarily English-speaking customer base:
Please, for the sake of your customers' blood pressure, be 100% sure that your call center folks have a perfect grasp of English and a clear speaking voice.
-I don't care where they were born.
-I don't care what their native language is.
-I don't even care whether an average dumb white American can pronounce or spell their names.
-I DO care that we can understand each other when we're trying to engage in a very serious transaction involving large sums of money and potential legal issues.
Look... I consider myself a fairly worldly person, and I'm actually very facile with languages and accents. I work in a place that's practically a Northwest U.N., ffs. If I didn't have a good understanding of different accents, I'd be totally lost.
So when someone like me, with that level of skill and understanding, has trouble communicating with your call center staff? You are SCREWING UP.
I have absolutely no problem with any retail or government office offering services in a dozen different languages. It doesn't bother me one iota when random people in the grocery store are merrily chatting away in anything from Spanish to Hindi to Tagalog to Ukranian. I actually find it kind of cool, and I feel lucky to live in an area that has such a wide variety of cultures. I feel neither offended nor threatened by an increasingly multicultural American landscape.
I'm even perfectly happy to wade through an initial automated menu asking what language I'd like to communicate in when I call. But when I press the button for English, I expect that the person on the other end is going to be speaking English. I don't care what version--California, Minnesota, Boston, Florida, London, Sydney, whatever--I just want the person on the other end to instantly understand the vocabulary and syntax I'm using to try to interact with them, and not take an extra two minutes after every sentence to mentally translate what I'm saying, and lose the point in the meantime.
I'm slightly less annoyed by this when I'm doing face-to-face interactions, because then we have body language and facial expressions to help us understand each other. But on a phone call, all you have is words and tone. You HAVE to make sure that those are clear in order to have a quick, pleasant and productive transaction that doesn't leave your customers reaching for the whisky after they hang up.
And if you don't care about your customers' stress levels, consider this: It wastes valuable call time. And having worked in call centers myself, I know how critical that is. If your service call takes an extra five minutes because your customers and staffers can't understand each other, that's wasted money. Whatever you may save by outsourcing is going right down the drain when your call volumes are high. It makes sense to have some staffers who speak other common languages, to serve those customers, but if your primary customer base speaks English, the vast majority of your call center staff should, too.
*headdesk*
This rant brought to you by the either sleepy, stoned or just coming off dental surgery Russian dude on the other end of the phone with our homeowners' insurance company. Who also--asshat--refused to let me speak to a supervisor when I asked for it, thinking my transaction was too complicated for him to understand.
A plea to all companies that use call centers to serve a primarily English-speaking customer base:
Please, for the sake of your customers' blood pressure, be 100% sure that your call center folks have a perfect grasp of English and a clear speaking voice.
-I don't care where they were born.
-I don't care what their native language is.
-I don't even care whether an average dumb white American can pronounce or spell their names.
-I DO care that we can understand each other when we're trying to engage in a very serious transaction involving large sums of money and potential legal issues.
Look... I consider myself a fairly worldly person, and I'm actually very facile with languages and accents. I work in a place that's practically a Northwest U.N., ffs. If I didn't have a good understanding of different accents, I'd be totally lost.
So when someone like me, with that level of skill and understanding, has trouble communicating with your call center staff? You are SCREWING UP.
I have absolutely no problem with any retail or government office offering services in a dozen different languages. It doesn't bother me one iota when random people in the grocery store are merrily chatting away in anything from Spanish to Hindi to Tagalog to Ukranian. I actually find it kind of cool, and I feel lucky to live in an area that has such a wide variety of cultures. I feel neither offended nor threatened by an increasingly multicultural American landscape.
I'm even perfectly happy to wade through an initial automated menu asking what language I'd like to communicate in when I call. But when I press the button for English, I expect that the person on the other end is going to be speaking English. I don't care what version--California, Minnesota, Boston, Florida, London, Sydney, whatever--I just want the person on the other end to instantly understand the vocabulary and syntax I'm using to try to interact with them, and not take an extra two minutes after every sentence to mentally translate what I'm saying, and lose the point in the meantime.
I'm slightly less annoyed by this when I'm doing face-to-face interactions, because then we have body language and facial expressions to help us understand each other. But on a phone call, all you have is words and tone. You HAVE to make sure that those are clear in order to have a quick, pleasant and productive transaction that doesn't leave your customers reaching for the whisky after they hang up.
And if you don't care about your customers' stress levels, consider this: It wastes valuable call time. And having worked in call centers myself, I know how critical that is. If your service call takes an extra five minutes because your customers and staffers can't understand each other, that's wasted money. Whatever you may save by outsourcing is going right down the drain when your call volumes are high. It makes sense to have some staffers who speak other common languages, to serve those customers, but if your primary customer base speaks English, the vast majority of your call center staff should, too.
*headdesk*
This rant brought to you by the either sleepy, stoned or just coming off dental surgery Russian dude on the other end of the phone with our homeowners' insurance company. Who also--asshat--refused to let me speak to a supervisor when I asked for it, thinking my transaction was too complicated for him to understand.