UK-Based Call Centres, Really Such a Good Thing?
Now I'm not a xenophobe or anything, but, like most people, when I need to phone a call centre I prefer to talk to people in my own country rather than any other (India being the major player in the field). The fact that you're calling them in the first place - at least for me - means you're desperate. The last thing you want is to struggle your way through a conversation.
Being able to speak English is not the same as speaking English.
Now, that said, it's not always a breath of fresh air when you see a company boast of its "UK-Based Call Centre". Whether this makes it any easier depends where in the UK it's based.
For a small country the UK has a surprisingly diverse range of regional accents. You only have to travel 20 mile or less to find the accent change almost beyond recognition.
Even from here in Nottingham to my home town of Mansfield, about 15 miles away, the accents vary. So much so that the men who rendered the outside of my office/garage last year (who were "rate Mansfield") were barely understandable -- and they're form the town I grew up in. I found myself doing that thing where you just smile and nod at people when you can't tell what they're saying.
Yesterday I couldn't remember the password for the root MySQL user on my LAMP server. I got so desperate that I called Fasthosts' support number, assuming it was a password they'd set as part of the initial setup (turns out they didn't and I had just forgotten).
Now, Fasthosts are based on Gloucester (pronounced "Glosta"), which is the "West Country", which is where they (some, not all) talk like farmers. The guy I talked to had a real farmer-boy accent. I'm not joking when I say I could barely understand a word he said.
It didn't help that he seemed not to care whether he could help. This is where I think the call centres on the sub-continent differ. They might struggle with the accents (us understanding theres as well as them ours) but at least they want to help.
Personally, I don't mind where the call centre is as long as they can actually help. I don't mind struggling through the language barrier as long as I find out what I want to know.
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Jake, I live in Spain and almost every phone company has moved their call centers to South America. The same language, but not the same language :-)
But the problem I find is not the language, is the fact that many of the people you talk to don't wanna help, they don't care at all if you solve your problem or if you change your phone company. Which is the problem ? Wages and so people going in and out constantly.People under-trained that are going to stay just for days or months in the company.... with an important lack in interest in what they are doing.
Once, dealing with an invoicing problem, I spent almost 3 hours on the phone. I said my name and my address twelve times to twelve different people. If I had had hair I would had stretched it :-) This is how it works here and as you say, phoning them is the last thing you wanna do.
Are you a native Spanish speaker Miguel? Only your command of the English langauge seems impeccable. Better than most English people can manage ;o)
Thank you and yes, Spanish from Spain, but a long long time Shakespeare's language student :-)
From the post: Gloucester (pronounced "Glosta")
Interestingly, Gloucester, Massachusetts; and Gloucester, Virginia; are pronounced exactly the same way, although I'm guessing that not very many other words have the same pronunciation in those three places!
In the US, accents are much more "homogenized", perhaps as a result of a lot of physical mobility among the people who live here. There are exceptions: there are quite a few recognizably different accents packed into the northeastern portion of the country, there are very distinct accents in south Louisiana and eastern Virginia, etc... but for the most part, all you can tell is that someone's from the south, from the Great Lakes region, from the interior west, from the west coast, etc.
Another fun language story: when I was in the navy, I spent some time on a NATO staff. Among my fellow officers were gents from Germany and the UK (among other places). So one time, the German and the British guy, who was from somewhere in Scotland, went to the exchange (a sort of department store on the base, which was in Norfolk, VA). The British guy needed some help from the staff, but the poor girl he was talking to was utterly unable to understand him. The German guy had to translate!
Odd Sean. I would have thought you'd have pronounced them more properly.
A better example is Leicester (have you got one of them?). Not pronounced "Lie-sester" but just "Lester" or "Lestar" if you're a bit "chavvy".
Even closer to home there's Southwell. Whether it's pronounced as it reads or as "Suvell" depends on a) if you live there (it's a bit posh) and b) if you wish you lived there. I call it "Suvel".
Scottish accents are something else all together...
Scottish accents are, in fact, native to the Royal Canadian Legion drinking halls, and are only accidentally found in that bit of Great Britain north of the wall.
There is some merit to the old BBC (and CBC) policy of having people speak in RP ("received pronunciation", for those who haven't run across the phenomenon). Having people speak in a standard accent, even if it is not the speaker's native tongue, so to speak, isn't dogmatic linguistic imperialism, it's good customer service. Even such fine old English institutions as Deutsche Welle get that much right.
Mind you, they also have to follow the "be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you emit" principle. I've been places here in Canada where, when folks tell you their first language is "English", you'd need to suppress a chuckle or two (I LOVE Newfies of the back-bay sort -- they're the finest souls on the planet, near as I can tell -- but what they speak is only English insofar as it is impossible to classify it as, say, French, Spanish or Gaelic*), and the regional French patois here does not easily travel from village to village, let alone make it between provinces. Folks in the call centres here need to be able to _understand_ a lot of different dialects, but they only need to be able to speak the One True Canadian Version (of English or French, as the case may be) in order to be understood by everyone.
So to Auntie Beeb (and the Canadian Broadcorping Castration) -- it's OKAY to tell us how to talk when you read the news. RP is the suit we can wear to the job interview. We may know Vicky Pollard, but we don't want her reading the news to us.
*Television is, unfortunately, levelling out the language; the young folk now are losing the gaelicisms in grammar that made Newfinese distinct as a language, and the accent is fading into memory.
On some of the IBM software product pages, you have an option to sametime a "specialist", a brilliant idea, and there is no questionable accents to overcome.
Accent barrier overcomed, if only they can answer your questions....
ha
I guess it's frustrating to need help and find language barriers, but when you found yourself in those situations is better when you just accept it and advance in your conversation.
Similar to what Sean mentions, I found myself (mexican, spanish speaker) being the "best" communicator in English in a project between our US/UK people and people from Kuwait. I always suggested them to make an effort to speak clearly (opening their mouth as necessary, and try to speak in a normal speed) and also to express their ideas in different ways if they see the other people is not getting them. It's very sad for me to see people stuck in a conversation because they are not understood and they just keep saying the same words once and again!
But of course, the bigger problem is not the language but the attitudes. Some support is just plain awful.
I don't mind so much talking to the India reps -- the whole phone support industry there has gotten so much better over the years.
What I don't like is when you call up support, talk to a native English speaker in the US for a while, and then get "transferred to another department," whereupon the connection gets full of static and there's a very consistent full-three-second pause between the time you say something and the new, very "crisp-talking" rep says something -- surprise, you've just been transferred to India!
Yeah, I know they're not technically lying by saying I'm being transferred to another department -- I just find it odd that they can't finish up what we were doing together before transferring me to a phone halfway around the world.
Was it working better during good old days when the calls were being picked up at the local office? Mostly yes? But someone wanted to save some money here... give a penny and expect same quality? :-) Rather than someone's accent let's blame the mindless cost-cutting happening...
Like was mentioned earlier, pronunciation in the English language is so peculiar any way. If you think of a word like "up" and all of the different ways that it can be used.
At a meeting, different topic's come UP. I've been asked to speak UP and type UP some notes.
We can call UP our friends, especially if they brighten UP a room. We polish UP the silver, and warm UP leftovers afterward we clean UP the kitchen.
In the dictionary the word UP takes UP a large portion of the page. Trying to count all of the different uses takes UP a lot of time.
So its easy for people to get mixed UP about UP! I know that many will think of this a waste of time reading this so I'll wrap it UP, before I'm told to shut UP.
But the English language many words that this.
And just think its the either last thing that you do at night or the first thing you do when you wake UP in the morning... U P! :)
Hey
Just a quick post whilst I'm trying on a new kilt here in bonnie Scotland!
Interesting that you pronounce "Gloucester" as "Glosta". I'd pronounce it "gloster" (not lose the "ter"). I quite like how certain English folks pronounce also "Manchester" as "Manchestuh".
Man I love accents!
You're right Gordon, I probably should have said Gloster.
Glasta is probably a bit more like how a Southerner might say it. Southern from here, that is.
Not sure if you spotted this
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/fasthosts_offshore/
;-)
Regarding the dropping (or not) of final R's: I'm from the Great Lakes region myself, so those towns come out as "Gloster" to me too. Of course, in some places in the US, R's get tacked on to the end of words for no apparent reason. I read a funny essay one time about a guy who moved to Boston as a child, and was forever confused - "Korea" was what you did for a living, and "career" was a peninsular nation in northeast Asia, for example.
There's a Leicester, Massachusetts, but I have no idea how they pronounce it... they talk funny up there :)
We also have a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Lancaster county, Virginia, which are pronounced with approximately equal emphasis on the first and second syllables by those not "in the know" - i.e. "Lan'cast'-r"... but with only the first syllable emphasized by those from the area - i.e. "Lan'c-st-r" (where the hyphen subs in for that backwards "e" thing indicating a non-emphasized vowel).
Jake, I think you should give up this Lotus thing and just start blogging about accents!
Well, replying to yourself is bad form... but I can't resist passing on another bit of fun with place names. Specifically, this has to do with Mother Goose, which those with children will remember as the classic collection of nursery rhymes. The edition most commonly found in the US is (I assume) the same as used in the UK, and hasn't been "improved" or "updated". The cool thing is that since Virginia stole all of our place names from Britain, all the action sounds like it's going on right here! When I read the limerick about the worrying old woman of Surrey, and my daughter asks "where's Surrey", well, it's right down the road from here! There's one that refers to "the King's highway"... which is the road I take to work every day! It's really cool.
It's the same in China. But the call center here can help me out of my problem, And so many companies have online agents, so it's quick and comfortable for a phone call.
Do you know why? Because there is so many people in China, if you slack in work, SORRY, you can go home!!
A bit of town name mutilation from the US for you. Decatuer - french I would think to pronounce "deh-ka-TOUA", but which is rendered locally as "Dih-KAY-ter".
Our local county seat is Belle Fontaine, which when I arrived I pronounced "Bell-eh Fon-tain", but was promptly corrected to say it as "Bell-fountain".
Most famously, Detroit - french pronunciation would go "Day-twa" as it was a former french trading post, but we say "Dee-troyt".
@YiMing - God bless the Chinese work ethic. Average Americans (dare I say Westerners) could learn something from that example.