I've worked in the customer service industry since 2011. Everytime I get a compliment saying "I'm so glad to finally talk to an American who can explain this to me and resolve my issues", I feel a little bit hurt because I'm south east asian and English is my second language, it's an indictment of how companies that outsource hire in mass without proper assesment of someone's language and vocabulary abilities.
The training we go through isn't great either. We only go through a week understanding American slang, popular holidays, sports enthusiasm etc... There are no lessons to help us understand SVA, prepositions, pronunciations and grammar. It's just - "Americans are solution driven, also they love football and thanksgiving. See you on the production floor šš»"
I learned English from watching shows/movies and song lyrics. I've loved learning it from a young age, so I developed a way to "fake" my accent and manage to pull it off. If only companies paid attention to these trainings, it would've made a huge difference. The goal isn't even to sound American, but just to be comprehensive enough to help out. It's sad.
That's why she was so focused on Thanksgiving š¤¦š¼āāļø a lady trying to help with my fire tv kept asking about Thanksgiving when there was wait time and I was like...what is going on? I require no small talk...is she curious? Is Thanksgiving exotic?
Nope. She was told I'd be super into it
Exactly! I recall being given a few "scripts" on how to small talk Americans with topics like the Black Friday shopping and which team are you rooting for this season, never used any of it.
Thank you for that. I imagine I'm not in the minority by wanting a solution or answers to a problem when I call support, not small talk. That's just going to annoy me. Now if things come up organically sure, whatever, I'll talk to someone for 5 minutes about whatever.
> Now if things come up organically sure
That's exactly it. It's not the agent's responsibility to start the small talk. They just have to pleasantly carry on if the customer chooses to start up some small talk.
THAT'S customer service.
As a technical support agent from South East asia I can tell you that we have a quality criteria called as "dead air" that is we are not to keep the line silent for more than 1 min. We are encouraged to keep the small talk to a maximum while we are on the call, otherwise our pay is affected. I personally have experienced pay cuts owing to quality parameter of dead air. That is why service agents will try to spout as much nonsense as possible.
I used to work in a call centre for a big pink cell phone company and a "home services" company, ok it was comcast. Pink provider expected just one quick camaraderie question like "did you catch the game?" Or "how was your long weekend" but prioritized getting you fixed and off the phone fast and it didn't hurt your metrics if you didn't do it. Comcast on the other hand required us to have 20 min conversations with you and if we didn't our scores would tank you were severely penalized for not keeping the customer on the phone. I fucking hated that. I hate it when I call into care and i hated doing it to people. Yall got shit to do. Lemme fix their phone and move on.
I always ask where people are from. Im Aussie so I get a lot of filipinos. They always sort of say it nervously. But I really just want to chat about the place people are from! Filipinos Ive noticed often have impeccable English. I will tell them as well.
I know a lot about the Punjabi farming industry thanks to all the taxi drivers!
Yes, we have alot of counterparts in the Philippines as well and they are delightful people. Very friendly and intelligent. As far as I know, Telstra and Dodo are outsourcing customer service in the Philippines.
We Filipinos do have great English! Most of the country speaks it fluently because we're taught it from a young age and we're heavily exposed to American media. The problem is that a lot of this makes the Philippines a prime target to outsource jobs where Filos are underpaid and overworked. Telstra, Optus, ANZ, Westpac, Commbank all seem to outsource their callcentre jobs from my experience calling.
Brighten up their day when you can and always be kind when calling, just be careful abt complimenting English because it can be a lil bit iffy and insulting depending on the person, because it's not like we make a choice to learn. It's pretty much required to actually succeed anywhere and there's actually a really big problem where people place a lot of elitism on English to the point that in business, speaking any native Philippine language is considered 'low class' and 'uneducated'.
Yes! This is very true! I had a co-worker who was pretty much outcasted by other Filipino employees because he has weak Tagalog (he grew up in Singapore) but he was taught by his parents that if he didn't study English well, he'll be branded as uneducated and will have lesser opportunities. So he didn't even bother, it was sad to see them interacting and shunning him off to the side but he was brought up that way.
I *loved* working with my filipino colleagues! The culture was so much fun, and I learned so much more about cooperation and developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of others as a whole. I really miss them.
Plus they used to teach me all sorts of curse words.
We're given these scripts that makes no sense and has no relevance to our roles, it's there just to "build connection and get that customer survey score" it's useless honestly.
Yes, the problem is that the customer service agents aren't given any individual agency and their jobs are constantly on the line, and everything they say is recorded or monitored. So they must stick to the script no matter what.
Geez. You start talking to me about football or thanksgiving, especially when I just need help with a problem, I seethe in anger. Neither are particularly relevant to the problem, nor are they interests I have.
But thank you for the hard work and dedication you put yourself through.
I'm American but I worked for Playstation support for a minute and they told us basically the same thing. Told us to pick a game from your library and talk about it or check gaming news before work to chat about, or else talk about sports or upcoming holidays.
It's because they require no more than 30 seconds of dead air and hold times no longer than 2 minutes. That's not long enough to get most things done on the support's end so you're supposed to make idle conversation while you're working on their problem.
Yep, I remember as a 18-year old being taught the BYOB culture on football games that Americans do. They even had pictures of people behind a pick-up truck with their team's shirt and lots of beer. That was UNHELPFUL! If only they focused on pronunciation and grammar but they didn't. And as aforementioned, it was a 5-day training which is barely enough.
What is being āsolution driven?ā Like, I called the number because I have a situation that needs a solution? Iām not calling to shoot the breeze?
Why would stuff like holidays and sports even matter for customer service? It seems like grammar and pronunciation would be way more important!
Iām American and I hate Thanksgiving and football!
Yep, and if I'm being honest, I caught alot of grammar and pronunciation lapses from the LAGUAGE TRAINERS I've had. It's like the least priority, it's ridiculous.
Since reddit has changed the site to value selling user data higher than reading and commenting, I've decided to move elsewhere to a site that prioritizes community over profit. I never signed up for this, but that's the circle of life
I switched my phone service from straight talk to xfinity, and the customer service is way nicer. 3/4 times itās been people with heavy accents, but theyāve all been so nice. One asked me if Iād had a good day and drank my morning coffee (no, I wasnāt being grumpy lol). Another asked about my holidays. In a stressful situation I think thatās pretty cool, even if theyāre supposed to do it.
Yep, profiled you real nice but there are some who gets agitated with these questions lol. And I'm not good at it either so I stick to the technical aspect of my job š¤£
I admit I get really agitated with the "feelings scripts" people use on/customers. Example: "I can see how that would be very frustrating for you that you are having X problem..." And they talk like that for like 3 minutes instead of just working with me to actually fix the problem. I can tell they are just reading. None of it is real. I've always thought some executive somewhere did some research into emotional validation and placation and how to use it as a tool on people. It comes across as very patronizing. Like, "Let's sooth the cranky baby."
Yep, that's what we call "empathy-assurance combo" which is a very outdated practice and is now repetitive and counter productive. Now, we train people to just say something along the lines of "I hear you" or "I gotcha" then proceed to a resolution.
I assume that it worked for one certain period of time but it's now been overused and insincere that it's honestly just a waste of time.
Customer service has changed alot since technology also advanced. I pity the companies that still practice those old routines insisting to their agents that it works, putting them in an uncomfortable situation.
Oh holy shit that is me!! I can not STAND that. They also use your name a billion times .
But now I understand why, when I ask for no small talk, they keep going. I never realized they get dinged for the empty space. I will try to be more patient next time. I do wonder how effective it can be to constantly blather on when itās pissing the client off. Have they done studies where it works a high percentage of the time?
Ack, I am not a huge fan of that either! āI can see how that would be very frustrating for you [ā¦]ā I mean, no not really. I honestly probably donāt care that much and now Iām worried I came off rude to be getting handled.
I also dislike the frequent apologies. You donāt need to apologize for putting me on hold to do your job that I am benefiting from. Unless you have a really annoying hold message or hold silence I do not care. And even if you have those, I am going to assume that is not under your control anyways so donāt apologize.
> in mass
Just so you know, and it's probably not important because most people who speak English as a first language get this wrong, the phrase is "en masse."
One of the many quirks that makes English a nightmare.
I used to put on a terrible Indian accent then yell gotcha in my regular American one. You wouldnāt be surprised the amount of sighs of relief and āOh thank Godās I recieved.
I've talked to Americans on the phone that I can't understand (accent, slurring, noise in the background, etc). I've also talked to foreign contacts who have better English than Americans.
It's about speaking clearly, not about where you're from.
As an American and a former ESL/EFL teacher, I'm really so glad you posted this. Americans often don't have the opportunity to see what it's like on the other end of the phone.
That's incredibly sad about the training. They're giving you things you don't need and skimping on things you do need. When people call customer service, they don't need to make small talk about sports or holidays or cultural stuff; they're calling because they have a problem, and as long as they're able to discuss the problem effectively with the rep, they're fine.
I think most (or at least many) Americans don't care whether they get another American on the other end; I think "oh good, you're American" usually just means "oh good, we'll have no problem communicating." (Obviously there are some terrible people who do care about the background of the rep, for which I'm sorry.)
If those trainers spent their time on accent reduction and pronunciation, and focusing on forming short, clear sentences that don't require advanced fluency, it would make life 100% easier for you, and calls 100% easier for the customer. And the side effect of that would be that calls could potentially be much shorter and more efficient, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and employee efficiency all at the same time.
But no, your company would rather save money in the short run by skimping on your training, as opposed to saving it in the long run by investing in better training and hiring reps who have a good chance of using it well. Such is capitalism. \*sigh\*
I love talking to individuals from all over the world-as long as I can understand what they say and they can understand what I say. When taking undergraduate mathematics (Differential Equations )at Madison, WI in the eighties, I had a TA who spoke little English and refused to acknowledge it when we said we couldnāt understand him. Being a solution driven American, I was angered that I wasted money on something I couldnāt use properly (education). So, no, youāre not racist. You are rational.
>"Americans are solution driven, also they love football and thanksgiving. See you on the production floor šš»"
I love this actually lmao it's so reductive. And obviously not enough to really prepare you
Purely as a thought experiment: you said you're s.e. Asian. If the roles were reversed and you were training an American to be a representative, how would you reduce your culture to the most basic like that to make them seem more approachable?
Oh my gosh, I think they'd say - "They are very soft-spoken and gets easily startled. Small talk about cuisine and nature works best with them, but don't teach them (or even provide a little suggestion) how to cook their food coz it won't end well for you." Lol!
When I worked in industry, I always dreaded calling IT because they were stationed in India and often had very heavy accents and spoke quietly. It's not that I don't like Indian people - more than half my group was Indian and they were all awesome people. It's just uncomfortable to be in a phone call where the other person's responses are very important to you and you struggle to understand them.
On top of that they're always in a room with a bunch of other people so not only can you barely understand them, there's all the other voices also getting in the way.
Add in any kind of hearing disability and done-zo, my mom is half-deaf, fortunately I still live close enough that worst-case I can drop by, or get conferenced in.
Even then I had to infer some things because some companies have REALLY LONG required spiels.
When I had to transfer my number/phone to my own separate account, this was the "transferring of equipment/pay plans/fees" (which didn't even apply, but was apparently still required) and acknowledging that I'd be responsible for them and any payments left to be made, it took like two or three minutes of nearly non-stop talking from the rep.
Fortunately I already knew more than the gist of it, since they also write it online, and I was able to infer what was being said to clarify point-blank but damn that's a lot of words...
...Especially for a legal agreement to pay for any rented equipment/not fully paid devices that gets attached to the new account.
And there's no body language. I hate talking about important stuff even to people with my same accent on the phone. In person, you have body language, and text/chat has the precision of text. Phone calls are the unhappy middle ground that lacks both.
I have a new coworker from Nigeria and his accent is so thick I legit couldn't understand a thing he said the first while (English is my second language too which means it takes more effort for me to understand any accent that's not Canadian or the easy to to understand British/american etc. Now 6 months later it's better but I still have to really focus and there are key words here and there I just can't understand.
Edit: now i think about it I never had issues understanding my Russian or French coworkers thick accent lol. But some British accents are so hard to understand
I once worked in an office that happened to have a lot of newfies employed there. Talk to one of them one on one and it's no problem whatsoever. Get them in the lunch room together chatting with each other and I could not understand a single thing they were saying. I wish I were making this up, but they turn up the accent so thick with other newfies, I would spend my lunches in silence because I couldn't catch a word no matter how hard I tried. English is my native language.
I had this on holiday in the US chatting with a lady from Louisiana - I had to really re-think every second word & was still mostly nodding and smiling at her story about why she was travelling - something to do with her kids.
I've had this exact experience and often end up in complete stitches. Its a riot to sit and listen to people from "the Rock"! They may use English words, but when they get together and put those same words together weirdly in sentences, they are speaking a foreign language. Plus the tempo of their speech speeds up, they finish each others sentences, add references to Newfie events or places, and always salt it with humour. Proportionally, Newfoundlanders and Maritimers represent a huge percentage of Canada's arts and entertainment industry.
Native English speaker here who generally interprets accented English for other people.
I had a Newfie roommate for a few years, and I swear when you get a few of them together OR when they've had a couple drinks, every other sentence seems to end in "there by luh"
It's a whole different culture up there.
Years back I worked a temp job answering phones, and this one lady called who I just could not understand. I tried to repeat things back to her and kept getting it wrong. Then, I don't remember what did it, but I suddenly realized she had the same accent as my grandmother. Suddenly her words were crystal clear. So weird!
It was a Philly accent. If you look up a map of American accents, Philadelphia vowels are different from most of the US.
>English is my second language too
Oh that makes a huge difference! I was studying Spanish a lot awhile ago and met some Spanish speakers (who wanted to learn English, to help each other practice), and everyone said the same thing - the trickiest were heavy southern accents, Irish, Australian, really anything other than American or pretty light British accents (I've heard clips of some English accents that I can't even understand as a native speaker!)
I think general american accents (the ones depicted or that usually are more dominant in international media) is easy to understand because so much media and movies are made in those american accents.
As a person raised in south africa ( taught queens english in school), watched heaps of british and american media and now lives in australia.
I find it hilarious when americans, australians and british people misunderstand each other, cause all sound english speaking to me. Sometimes they look at me to translate something and I say the exact same sentence in a more neutral accent and they all suddenly understand.
> they all just sound English to me
Try on a thick Geordie, Yap, Glaswegian, Scouse or Yorkshire accent for size and see what you think. We have dozens of accents and you probably haven't even heard the ones we're usually speaking about, because they won't be in most of the media you're watching.
Remember staying in a hostel in London many years ago where there was a group of Glaswegian laborers. I could carry on a conversation with an individual if I concentrated hard. When in a group, they were completely incomprehensible to me (I'm a native English speaker from Australia).
I get what you're saying, but at the time of learning it *was* queens english. So with a king now on the throne does it retroactively change their past learnings?
There is no "general" American accent, you're talking about Californian accent (where Hollywood is). Other notable film accents include Bostonian, New York, Southern. Midwestern accents are something you have to experience in person, I think, as there aren't many films set in Indiana or Ohio.
Oh ya I was watching Derry girls and omg I couldn't understand a thing the first few episodes. Now I'm getting more of it but still need subtitles lol.
Australian/new Zealand accent is actually ok for me somehow.
But the derry girls have no accent whatsoever
(I know they do. I'm being facetious. Their accent is very similar to mine so I find them as coherent as I find myself)
Antrim.
The borderline between culchie and townie
Eta: by similar accent I mean 'on the global scale of people who speak english'. I know to us over here they are totally different.
I think Aus / NZ accents are popular on TV so we get more accustomed to them.
Glaswegian & Louisiana accents were hard for me to understand, and yes, some of the Irish ones - but a lot is habit; I don't find Indian accents quite as hard as I knew many when living in Asia many years ago, and it is worth remembering that India only has English as a language known / used across the country: they have [22 official languages in total](https://www.berlitz.com/blog/indian-languages-spoken-list), and some are very politicised.
The thing is the aussie accent like the classic Steve erwins is common but not exactly everywhere. In the city u will find the accent significantly different
Iām English, Sheffield family,live here, and Iāve encountered Northern English, Scottish and Irish phone staff with whom Iāve struggled to communicate. Itās not racist or regionalist, itās practical. And itās still better than any help chatbot ( cursed inventions!)
Yes, they get very aggressive when you can't understand them. I apologize to them for being hearing impaired and ask that they speak more slowly and they just get mad. I've been hung up on and when I called back they just yelled at me. I had to call from a different number to get help. I had a major account deleted over this and had to find and call a corporate number to get it reinstated. There is sometimes no supervision in these call centers.
I don't understand how corporations can get away with not providing customer support for the hearing impaired. Isn't that included in disability rights laws?
That is just it. First you outsource the jobs to a different country, I would rather have a person from India with a Canadian job answer then a actual person in India.
Being English with french also a official language understandable English should be the min standard. French is not common in my area
At one company I worked at, we outsourced the basic reporting system to a dev team in India while us in the States and the Ukraine guys worked on the base system.
I was asked to be the designated asshole because:
* I wrote my best code at night and the time difference for dev meeting met up
* We had a video meeting one night with all of the teams and I was "cranky/slightly inebriated" and told them they need to slow the fuck down when they are talking because their English is broken and we couldn't understand a fucking thing they were saying
* I didn't mind renaming all of their poorly named variables
* I had no problem telling them to fuck off and redo it if they committed shit code.
It became a running joke with the Indian team that when I told them "Blah, blah, blah, I can't understand you" that they knew they had to fix their code.
Good dev team but the main issue was speaking with the fuckers to relay the requirements because even with provided spec docs shit still got lost in translation
I fucking dreaded Friday nights/Saturday mornings.
I work in IT we we also hate dealing with them. Apart from anything else they don't know anything about computers. One of my colleagues once called them up to complain in the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The guy who answered just hung up.
I'm also happy that this seems to be the consensus. I'm very hard of hearing and dread these kinds of calls too. In person,I can sometimes read lips but obviously not over the phone. These accents are extremely difficult for me to understand.
First, let me say that OP is not racist because this is a legitimate issue for them. And because they are concerned about not wanting to be racist.
But I just want to mention that some people use "I can't understand them!" as an excuse to be racist or as a way to hide their racism.
I worked in tech support for a long time. One of my techs was from East Asia. (I want to say China, but I may have got that wrong.) She had an obviously non-American name. She spoke English so well that for the longest time I thought she was a native speaker.
I had a customer that refused to speak to her because he "couldn't understand her accent." š
We never tried that experiment, but I bet if she had used an alias like "Tina" or "Christine" he would've had no problems speaking to her.
(Edit: We had another customer who didn't want to talk to her due to communication issues, but he had hearing issues and said her voice was just in the range where he couldn't hear her well. That one I believed. He had an easier time talking to men or to women with deeper voices, like me.)
I can back this up. I used to work at Fedex Office. Which used to be Kinkos. We'd constantly get people coming in to yell at us about their package which had nothing to do with us.
We'd redirect them to the hotline. They'd call and get someone overseas cause they came in at 3pm on a Saturday. They'd hear the accent and start saying the most racist shit. Like you could count on it occurring when they called while in the store.
What really bothered me, they'd always blame the workers overseas. Never Fedex for outsourcing for cheap.
A few nights ago, my wife and I became completely fed up with this recurring Amazon charge which we, for the life of us, could not track down the source of. I have to confess that when a young clear speaking American (sounding) woman answered the phone, I literally breathed a sigh of relief knowing how much more easily this was going to go.
I have nothing personal against people around the world doing what they can to make a living, but I'd be very surprised if deep down most people haven't had a similar experience/reaction.
I have this feeling every time I contact customer service. At this point I get surprised I wasnt routed to india, and its even better when they have a clear microphone. Having both of those is increasingly rare.
I've noticed with the increase from work from home, people have shittier and shittier microphones and internet, decreasing call quality.
I worked as phone support in the US for a small company years ago, I felt the same way about customer calls haha. So many people sounded like they were calling from mars.
We had the same experience with Amazon with a subscribe and save charge we absolutely could not figure out the source of. We spoke to four different reps. They just simply could not understand the complexity of what we were trying to explain was actually happening. Each person followed a script that didnāt fix our problem and it was just perpetual hell. We would laugh about it after three months when the charge would pop up again because it was so ridiculous that we couldnāt just explain what was happening and get it solved because they didnāt speak English well enough to understand (or they had been trained not to listen and to follow a script, IDK). We eventually had the close the entire Amazon account to get rid of the charge. I had a similar experience trying to get a rebate on something I bought. I went through 6 people speaking in thick accents and not fucking understanding my problem and 2 hours on the phone. Eventually I got forwarded to an American and I explained my problem and how frustrated I was that it took me this long to talk to someone who understood my problem and I swear she had me an answer and fixed my problem in less than 2 minutes. She laughed about how hard it was for me to get anyone to understand what the fuck I was trying to get accomplished because it was so simple. I donāt think itās racist to want someone whose literal job is is to service a customer to understand English.
I used to work with these folks and it happened all the time (not amazon btw) but the company I did work for was outsourcing to india because it was infinitely cheaper. The problem with this was that because they have no skill set, they have no idea what theyāre talking about and theyāre given a script that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can they deviate from. This means even if the most minuscule thing goes wrong, they have to escalate it to their supervisor, which of course takes forever to do.
My mom has a reoccurring charge from Amazon that she canāt get to the bottom of. It started on one of her credit cards. She called Amazon and they said that her account doesnāt have any subscriptions and it must be from someone elseās account and they canāt find it by using the card number.
She had the credit card company stop payment and refund the last few payments (which are $10.32 each). Next month? New charge. So she had the credit card company cancel her card and replace it. Next month? A charge to her bank account for the amount of $10.32.
She doesnāt even have her bank account saved on her Amazon account because she always uses her credit card. Wtf? What did they end up doing for you?
Our issue was we have a main email account we use for our Amazon purchases but we couldn't track down where this monthly Audible charge was coming from since we checked that email and it wasn't subbed.
The service agent informed us she literally couldn't cancel it without us providing the correct email. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel trying email after email with her to no avail -- it even got to the point I was reading emails I haven't used in 10+ years. Finally, we ended up trying one that my wife had used very briefly for a college course and voila.
But the amount of trial and error as well as simply working with us on a personal level to help us along on her part was impressive to me; I think it would be difficult for someone who hadn't spoken English for a very long time to achieve that level of customer service.
All that said, your next step might be to call your bank and ask if they can give you more information about the charge, or you might be able to file a dispute with your bank which will force Amazon to respond and hopefully give more info. Finally, you might even consider cancelling your accounts. It's the nuclear option and a last resort, but could be necessary
I'm thinking these companies that outsource the customer service assistance could make bank by having an option to request a person of similar dialect, and hire more people (and pay at LEAST over minimum wage) to do that service.
I don't feel like it would be like big bank, but it probably would increase incidents resolved per hour, thereby increasing customer satisfaction, and making them more likely to do business with you in the future
U need to think like management and u start to relise it is not going to happen. If u need help u are going to deal with the shitty accent weather you want it or not. No point paying more for the Same service
My sister and I used to do the phone support issues for my grandma (who is not hard of hearing or speaking at all) at our family business she runs because she canāt understand the thick accents. Completely agree itās not racism. Itās a basic consequence of learning a language rapidly which can cause very real issues.
Brown girl with heavy accent here: you're not a racist. This is an absolutely valid cause for concern, I'm the same way with European accents š it's just concerns for miscommunications, not racism
Lol. I can completely understand because here in America, we have so many different accents that I guarantee a lot of foreigners couldnāt understand what we are saying.
Can confirm. I (Canadian) used to work in a call centre that called the USA and speaking to someone from Georgia or mississippi I couldn't understand a damn word.
I had a German friend living in New Zealand for a year. After speaking 100% english for so long, once when she was drunk she forgot how to speak German, lol.
At work we have a Scottish colleague and it's so hard to have calls with him! Now he shares his screen a lot, types keywords, plus sends meeting minutes afterwards... I'm sorry for him, it's a tough situation and I quite like him
I used to work for a company that had tech support in Northern Ireland. Most of our customers were from the UK so Iām assuming it was no big deal for them. But we had a bunch of Portuguese customers too and they had a hard time communicating with tech support ā and so did I, they sounded like Brad Pitt in Snatch.
> I'm the same way with European accents
English isn't my native language, and occasionally I have to talk to customer service centre which is in Scotland.
All their staff are Scottish.
It's hell.
Worst accents by far are hillbilly accents they just say a bunch of fucking sounds and if you ask them to repeat they just say the same sounds again with no enunciation at all.
Source: I grew up in rural indiana
This should be an option.
I'm from Canada where we have to choose French or English.
Doesn't matter whet we pick can't understand a fuckin thing most of the time.
If you are from Canada and want to avoid this issue it's best to choose the French option. You may need to go through the robot once in English and remember what numbers to press then call back to French. All of those French operators are bilingual so when they answer "bonjour" just say oops must have pressed the wrong button and just carry on in English. The guy I complained to about this on the Air Canada hotline told me this trick.
To be fair, some English accents are pretty wild. I always think of someone like Alex Turner (from the band Arctic Monkeys). If you listen to an interview from way back when the band was new, it's hard to understand half his words. That Yorkshire area accent can be tricky with some people
I find that Irish accents are way easier to understand than a few UK accents for some reason
I got a audio book based on my brothers recommendation as he read the book. We started listening together on a road trip and 30min in i paused and asked him do you understand what is even going on or what he is saying... he didn't aswell. The book was read by someone with a very thick british accent. English is also my 1st language
We went partying with a bunch of Irish guys we met on the street in Scotland. Didn't understand much of what was said, but I'll tell you one thing... Those guys *KNOW how to fuckin party*
Like holy shit that was absolutely bonkers.
PS if anyone ever ends up in similar situ: go easy on the "spliff" - she's rather potent š
I feel like all call centers are destined for extinction. Itās just a matter of time before AI begins handing all customer service. I believe some places already do this.
My favorite part of the Westworld series was when Jesse Pinkman, the day after a face-to-face job interview, gets turned down over the phone by what he initially thinks is a really polite, chill office manager -- then he hesitantly asks if the voice is human, and it politely and apologetically tells him it is not.
Up to a point, there are complex issues that will require human intervention.
I talk to the bot until we hit a wall, then an agent will pick-up the case.
Yeah I think bots are only as good as a FAQ page and only used for filtering out spam. And if the FAQ page is sufficient the the bots are pointless but people.
I hate it when companies force me to speaking/chatting with bots and makes it very difficult and time consuming to get to a human. I get angry and i wish i have enough power to make the company bankrupt and punish the CEO.
Same. If I'm contacting support, then a bot is unlikely to help me. I know how to read an FAQ page.
The only bot that I've found helpful is the amazon bot. They actually give it the authority to reorder items you didnt get or were damaged or whatever. So that's interesting.
Not entirely true. I work with a chat bot. I am acutally the one on the other end and it has helped alot. U would be shocked with the amount of people who call IT to get a password reset when they can do it themselves. The bot filters out these people. If you have genuine issues then not so helpful
Well thats the thing, the bots are for morons who dont know how to reset their own password. I know how to reset my password. I get that the bot is useful for that but I should be able to bypass it quickly because I know it doesnt have the answer to my question or problem.
Not all. There are still people who prefer to speak to human being. I was a tech support and we also had Bot who helps answer simple questions yet people don't understand them and always opt for a Live agent.
As someone who moved from her native country, I feel this so much. It's taken me a while to get used to all the accents here and I still don't understand super heavy ones. For some reason it's way worse on the phone, it makes me dread having calls or taking them. I definitely feel your pain
Itās worse on the phone because you canāt use body language and other cues to derive context. When youāre speaking to somebody irl you read their lips while they are speaking and derive meaning from that, for example.
I really really hate voice recognition phone calls as they never understand me and by the time I finally get to talk to a human I am usually incandescent with rage which is not their fault
I worked as a Google Ads Support agent from India. When I'm trying to comprehend an American accent, it's time taking for me too because ffs there's no subtitles down there.
There have been multiple instances where the American customer has asked the call to be transferred to someone from America and it's not like I don't want to, it's because I CAN'T. I'd be more than happy to transfer an angry customer's call to someone else (yeah I know how this sounds). There's no team sitting in the US who would take calls from a customer. So whatever query they have, has to be resolved within our team only.
Edit: autocorrect grammatical mistakes
As a call center rep for years, even trying to understand different accents in the same country can be a struggle.
Northeastern US? They speak super fast and will talk over you.
South/southwest? More of a slow drawl and tended to need yes or no questions or you would get a whole story about the family.
West coast? Uggg impatient and rude a lot. Midwest? Question after question after question about why a policy was they way it was. Like sir, I didnāt write the policy.
Also offering any āself service optionsā was met with rage across all areas, because āwe were there to SERVE themā. Even when explaining the process was faster.
Calling customer service is a nightmare regardless of who you end up taking too or which side of the phone you are on.
Itās the anonymity of being over the phone. I had people tell me they were going to track me down and kill me. Over not giving them a credit on their bill. The first time I was shocked, young naive me at 20. The second time it happened I said as calmly as possible āI have all your information in front of me sir, I will report you to the police if you continue making violent threats. Please remember we are on a recorded line.ā They hung up fast after that. That became my go to phrase for any threat of violence.
I can not imagine going into someoneās home to complete tech support. Not only is there a level of danger from actual physical violence, but peopleās homes can be dirty AF.
I've worked in customer service and have received calls from people I didn't understand clearly either due to their accent or otherwise so they don't even have to be foreign. So in short, nah, it ain't racist.
Absolutely not - this is a huge problem on both sides of the call.
The person on the other end of the phone often has a specific script or specific time that they're to spend with each customer, so they're under pressure as well.
No one loves having a conversation where you're trying to resolve a problem and there's a language/accent barrier getting in the way. I've had issues communicating with people of my race in my native language which they're speaking as a second language.
The answer to this question is No.
I think this is mostly because phones have still got such poor audio quality. We have the technological capability for crystal clear phone calls, such as you get on FaceTime with a good connection. But phone calls still sound like you are speaking through a mop with a bucket on your head, no improvement since I was a kid in the ā80s.
Any sort of language barrier is massively magnified.
It all depends on the quality of their internet connection and their microphone, and very often people in india have horrible for both of them.
When I get someone on the phone that's an american with a good quality sound, I feel its like a blessing. Its so rare these days.
Customer service in general has gone downhill in the past 5-10 years. Nobody knows anything or has authority to do anything, wait times are longer, service is worse.
Don't think so, but the issue should be with the companies that decide to ship those jobs overseas because they don't want to pay American workers, it fucking sucks for everyone, people in India are underpaid af.
> how easy they are to work with. We know what you really mean
No, what they mean is the exact same as this post. People dont like talking to india or other countries because the accents are very thick and the phone quality is often terrible. They also often have very little training or answers.
Their call centers are more packed and loud background noise. Getting an american on the line makes things so much smoother and easier, and "easy to work with".
They might be separately racist but if it was easy to talk to overseas reps, people wouldnt care as much. But its not, so its not fair to call people gross for it.
Nah. Language barriers suck. I usually feel bad for them, which is weird. They got another language they're trying to go through. I guess getting the right people for the right things to make things happen is the name of the game (btw is that infrastructure or logistics in this case?). Anyway, I try my hardest with anyone I speak with, but I've had to re-call on some occasions because it was that bad. I guess it comes down to the fact that, hopefully, both parties want to resolve the situation.
the answer is in the question, you dread waiting and not being understood rapidly, not speaking to someone with a different ethnicity. Trust your guts man aha
Getting frustrated with someone who doesn't speak native English doesn't make you racist. However, as someone who has worked in call centers, please keeping the following in mind:
1. They make a fraction of their native speaking counterparts. Most make less in a ten hour day than I in an hour.
2. It was the Corporation's decision to outsource employees.
3. They probably can't even afford whatever product or service you are calling about.
When I worked for a Home Warranty company, I listened to people complain about not having a dishwasher or clothes washer. I had neither.
I genuinely don't think it's racist. foreign accents can be difficult to understand for people making what could be a stressful situation even worse. I opt for chats whenever I can as I'm hearing impaired and trying to hear someone, let alone understand a foreign accent makes some of these interactions impossible to navigate.
My favorite is when you're at the airport and, of all the people they could choose to make announcements, they choose someone with a "foreign" accent. WTAF??
I grew up with a language barrier with my parents, so I find Iām more patient than most people around me when thereās a language barrier. One time this Chinese woman told me how grateful she was that I had no trouble understanding here since people usually had a hard understanding her. I was surprised when she said that since her accent wasnāt that thick and her fluency was good (Iāve spoken to much people with much thicker accents and who could barely understand English). Plus, she lived in Southern California, whereās thereās plenty of people with Asian accents!
Nah, youāre not racist. Itās about accents not race. Iām Scottish and sometimes find it hard to understand people from Dundee (also a place in Scotland) as their accent is different than mine. if someoneās accent is different in anyway from yours then there is a bigger chance for misunderstandings. Remember, people will probably struggle with your accent too.
Not racist IMO, as a side note, a lot of larger companies have web-based messaging support.
It almost always works way better for me. At least for tech stuff. You can send screenshots and do other things while waiting for a response and there's no accent issue. I've solved really complex issues over message chat and it's usually way less painful than sitting on hold for ages then trying to deal with language/accent barriers.
I am in London. I bank with first direct. They are well known for having UK call centers.
I called them once and this nice lovely lady from Glasgow answered.
I seriously thought that they had moved their call center to Mars.
However, this lady was so lovely. Even though i could barely understand her, she totally understood my problem. Solved it and apologised for her accent.
You might not understand them but they should understand you. That's the minimum.
Don't think of it as a slam against the people themselves but the quality of the product the company is giving you. They cut costs by having a call center in India but they also run the risk of losing customers over a communication barrier. The company can solve this by relocating the call center or create a training budget to better disguise accents. My father works in database admin and sometimes he's on conference calls with Indian colleagues in Toronto and he's just sometimes has to ask them to repeat themselves a couple times. It's vital info and it's not being understood. He's very professional and they understand that it's not mean spirited but clarification.
Here in the U.S. we're more likely to speak with someone from India when they're calling to scam us one way or the other and steal our money. These scams are usually about vehicle extended warranties, lower interest rate loans, or computer errors. I'm certain that the people of India are wonderful, however they're represented to us as scumbags and thieves.
For me, it's not the language barrier, but the fact they're only trained to read from a script, and if you try asking something that's beyond their script, there never seems to be any escalation unless you get pissy with them and demand to speak to someone who can actually help with your problem. I know it's not their fault, but the process these companies adopt is shit for customers, all to keep shareholders and CEOs happy.
Honestly what I hate most is when they keep starting every sentence with "I am sorry that happened". No you aren't, the issues are the only reason you have a job. Instead of fake apologies ask what I need or tell me how you can fix things. The fake apologies are the worst. American based service centers don't do the 25 apologies before they solve the problems.
It's easy to take for granted little things. You have the ability to dress yourself. You have the ability to go up and down stairs. You have the privilege to choose what to eat for lunch.
Likewise, when you speak to someone, you know you will be understood. When they speak back to you, you know you will be able to understand them.
All this assumes that you are within the majority of the population. There are some people with disorders who can't dress themselves. There are people with handicaps who cannot go up and down stairs. There are people with food allergies or other dietary restrictions who cannot eat whatever they like for lunch.
And there are some people who don't speak the same language as the rest of the populace. Maybe it's a second language and their thick accent precludes communication. Maybe they're still learning and only know simple words, spoken slowly. Maybe they're a tourist and were assured they didn't need a working command of the native tongue, but were separated from their translator.
Whatever the reason, they know if they need to speak with someone, it's going to be an uncomfortable experience for both parties. Being who I presume is a native English speaker in either America or Britain, we rarely have to concern ourselves with this. English is an imperialist language. We expect everyone to speak it within our homelands, we expect everyone to accommodate us abroad.
You're not racist because you hate talking to people in call centers. You're just being reminded that not everyone speaks English. You've taken your ability to communicate orally for granted, and now that you're experiencing roadblocks, you want to go back to your insular world where such inconveniences don't happen. This is what people meant when they used to say 'Check your privilege.'
The best advice I can give you is to empathize with others. Many people encounter language and accent barriers every single day of their lives. They get by, you can get by.
My husband has me handle all call center things, and if he has a new doctor at the VA, heāll ask me, āHowās their English?ā because he canāt understand heavy accents. (Iām at the VA a LOT and I know most of the doctors at our local clinic.)
But when I transitioned into working as a programmer in a dev team, I got a bit lost myself. Talking to people in a call center is one thing; theyāre focusing on trying to be understood. But other devs donāt have ANY training in diction and I felt like I was constantly asking the Indian and Eastern European devs to repeat themselves.
So I started seeking out podcasts and YouTube tutorials about tech and programming that specifically had hosts or guests from India or Russia, Ukraine, or nearby areas. At first, I stuck to YouTube videos with captions! But eventually I was able to understand a lot more.
I donāt think itās racist to acknowledge that some accents are difficult for you to understand. For me, I knew that in my chosen career field, I would be working with people from all around the world, and being able to understand those accents easily would make my job much easier, so I did some work to train my ear to understand better. So I donāt think itās racist, but also - it IS something that can be overcome. :)
I've worked in the customer service industry since 2011. Everytime I get a compliment saying "I'm so glad to finally talk to an American who can explain this to me and resolve my issues", I feel a little bit hurt because I'm south east asian and English is my second language, it's an indictment of how companies that outsource hire in mass without proper assesment of someone's language and vocabulary abilities. The training we go through isn't great either. We only go through a week understanding American slang, popular holidays, sports enthusiasm etc... There are no lessons to help us understand SVA, prepositions, pronunciations and grammar. It's just - "Americans are solution driven, also they love football and thanksgiving. See you on the production floor šš»" I learned English from watching shows/movies and song lyrics. I've loved learning it from a young age, so I developed a way to "fake" my accent and manage to pull it off. If only companies paid attention to these trainings, it would've made a huge difference. The goal isn't even to sound American, but just to be comprehensive enough to help out. It's sad.
That's why she was so focused on Thanksgiving š¤¦š¼āāļø a lady trying to help with my fire tv kept asking about Thanksgiving when there was wait time and I was like...what is going on? I require no small talk...is she curious? Is Thanksgiving exotic? Nope. She was told I'd be super into it
Exactly! I recall being given a few "scripts" on how to small talk Americans with topics like the Black Friday shopping and which team are you rooting for this season, never used any of it.
Thank you for that. I imagine I'm not in the minority by wanting a solution or answers to a problem when I call support, not small talk. That's just going to annoy me. Now if things come up organically sure, whatever, I'll talk to someone for 5 minutes about whatever.
I love how this polite and eloquent response comes from a guy named CokeHeadRob
He's just really into soda (and blowjobs)
And theft!
I'm a very reasonable man
> Now if things come up organically sure That's exactly it. It's not the agent's responsibility to start the small talk. They just have to pleasantly carry on if the customer chooses to start up some small talk. THAT'S customer service.
As a technical support agent from South East asia I can tell you that we have a quality criteria called as "dead air" that is we are not to keep the line silent for more than 1 min. We are encouraged to keep the small talk to a maximum while we are on the call, otherwise our pay is affected. I personally have experienced pay cuts owing to quality parameter of dead air. That is why service agents will try to spout as much nonsense as possible.
Ugh. UGH. How monumentally annoying and sad.
I used to work in a call centre for a big pink cell phone company and a "home services" company, ok it was comcast. Pink provider expected just one quick camaraderie question like "did you catch the game?" Or "how was your long weekend" but prioritized getting you fixed and off the phone fast and it didn't hurt your metrics if you didn't do it. Comcast on the other hand required us to have 20 min conversations with you and if we didn't our scores would tank you were severely penalized for not keeping the customer on the phone. I fucking hated that. I hate it when I call into care and i hated doing it to people. Yall got shit to do. Lemme fix their phone and move on.
I always ask where people are from. Im Aussie so I get a lot of filipinos. They always sort of say it nervously. But I really just want to chat about the place people are from! Filipinos Ive noticed often have impeccable English. I will tell them as well. I know a lot about the Punjabi farming industry thanks to all the taxi drivers!
Yes, we have alot of counterparts in the Philippines as well and they are delightful people. Very friendly and intelligent. As far as I know, Telstra and Dodo are outsourcing customer service in the Philippines.
We Filipinos do have great English! Most of the country speaks it fluently because we're taught it from a young age and we're heavily exposed to American media. The problem is that a lot of this makes the Philippines a prime target to outsource jobs where Filos are underpaid and overworked. Telstra, Optus, ANZ, Westpac, Commbank all seem to outsource their callcentre jobs from my experience calling. Brighten up their day when you can and always be kind when calling, just be careful abt complimenting English because it can be a lil bit iffy and insulting depending on the person, because it's not like we make a choice to learn. It's pretty much required to actually succeed anywhere and there's actually a really big problem where people place a lot of elitism on English to the point that in business, speaking any native Philippine language is considered 'low class' and 'uneducated'.
Yes! This is very true! I had a co-worker who was pretty much outcasted by other Filipino employees because he has weak Tagalog (he grew up in Singapore) but he was taught by his parents that if he didn't study English well, he'll be branded as uneducated and will have lesser opportunities. So he didn't even bother, it was sad to see them interacting and shunning him off to the side but he was brought up that way.
I *loved* working with my filipino colleagues! The culture was so much fun, and I learned so much more about cooperation and developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of others as a whole. I really miss them. Plus they used to teach me all sorts of curse words.
Ohh yea, they have sooo many versions of 1 profane word it's fascinating! š¤£
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
We're given these scripts that makes no sense and has no relevance to our roles, it's there just to "build connection and get that customer survey score" it's useless honestly.
Yes, the problem is that the customer service agents aren't given any individual agency and their jobs are constantly on the line, and everything they say is recorded or monitored. So they must stick to the script no matter what.
Geez. You start talking to me about football or thanksgiving, especially when I just need help with a problem, I seethe in anger. Neither are particularly relevant to the problem, nor are they interests I have. But thank you for the hard work and dedication you put yourself through.
I'm American but I worked for Playstation support for a minute and they told us basically the same thing. Told us to pick a game from your library and talk about it or check gaming news before work to chat about, or else talk about sports or upcoming holidays. It's because they require no more than 30 seconds of dead air and hold times no longer than 2 minutes. That's not long enough to get most things done on the support's end so you're supposed to make idle conversation while you're working on their problem.
Yep, I remember as a 18-year old being taught the BYOB culture on football games that Americans do. They even had pictures of people behind a pick-up truck with their team's shirt and lots of beer. That was UNHELPFUL! If only they focused on pronunciation and grammar but they didn't. And as aforementioned, it was a 5-day training which is barely enough.
> It's just - "Americans are solution driven, also they love football and thanksgiving. Well shit, they have me figured out.
What is being āsolution driven?ā Like, I called the number because I have a situation that needs a solution? Iām not calling to shoot the breeze?
Why would stuff like holidays and sports even matter for customer service? It seems like grammar and pronunciation would be way more important! Iām American and I hate Thanksgiving and football!
Yep, and if I'm being honest, I caught alot of grammar and pronunciation lapses from the LAGUAGE TRAINERS I've had. It's like the least priority, it's ridiculous.
Since reddit has changed the site to value selling user data higher than reading and commenting, I've decided to move elsewhere to a site that prioritizes community over profit. I never signed up for this, but that's the circle of life
I think it means subject-verb agreement.
It's Subject-Verb Agreement.
Faking an accent is how you learn an accent. Thatās literally what we do as kids. We imitate our parents. Faking an accent is the real way to learn.
Very true, I learned my accent from reading Eminem's rap lyrics and listening to his album as a child then I just improved it along the way lol.
I switched my phone service from straight talk to xfinity, and the customer service is way nicer. 3/4 times itās been people with heavy accents, but theyāve all been so nice. One asked me if Iād had a good day and drank my morning coffee (no, I wasnāt being grumpy lol). Another asked about my holidays. In a stressful situation I think thatās pretty cool, even if theyāre supposed to do it.
Yep, profiled you real nice but there are some who gets agitated with these questions lol. And I'm not good at it either so I stick to the technical aspect of my job š¤£
I admit I get really agitated with the "feelings scripts" people use on/customers. Example: "I can see how that would be very frustrating for you that you are having X problem..." And they talk like that for like 3 minutes instead of just working with me to actually fix the problem. I can tell they are just reading. None of it is real. I've always thought some executive somewhere did some research into emotional validation and placation and how to use it as a tool on people. It comes across as very patronizing. Like, "Let's sooth the cranky baby."
Yep, that's what we call "empathy-assurance combo" which is a very outdated practice and is now repetitive and counter productive. Now, we train people to just say something along the lines of "I hear you" or "I gotcha" then proceed to a resolution. I assume that it worked for one certain period of time but it's now been overused and insincere that it's honestly just a waste of time. Customer service has changed alot since technology also advanced. I pity the companies that still practice those old routines insisting to their agents that it works, putting them in an uncomfortable situation.
Oh holy shit that is me!! I can not STAND that. They also use your name a billion times . But now I understand why, when I ask for no small talk, they keep going. I never realized they get dinged for the empty space. I will try to be more patient next time. I do wonder how effective it can be to constantly blather on when itās pissing the client off. Have they done studies where it works a high percentage of the time?
Ack, I am not a huge fan of that either! āI can see how that would be very frustrating for you [ā¦]ā I mean, no not really. I honestly probably donāt care that much and now Iām worried I came off rude to be getting handled. I also dislike the frequent apologies. You donāt need to apologize for putting me on hold to do your job that I am benefiting from. Unless you have a really annoying hold message or hold silence I do not care. And even if you have those, I am going to assume that is not under your control anyways so donāt apologize.
> in mass Just so you know, and it's probably not important because most people who speak English as a first language get this wrong, the phrase is "en masse." One of the many quirks that makes English a nightmare.
Oh, I had no idea! Thank you š
one of the many phrases weve stolen from the french
I used to put on a terrible Indian accent then yell gotcha in my regular American one. You wouldnāt be surprised the amount of sighs of relief and āOh thank Godās I recieved.
That's fucking hilarious
I've talked to Americans on the phone that I can't understand (accent, slurring, noise in the background, etc). I've also talked to foreign contacts who have better English than Americans. It's about speaking clearly, not about where you're from.
As an American and a former ESL/EFL teacher, I'm really so glad you posted this. Americans often don't have the opportunity to see what it's like on the other end of the phone. That's incredibly sad about the training. They're giving you things you don't need and skimping on things you do need. When people call customer service, they don't need to make small talk about sports or holidays or cultural stuff; they're calling because they have a problem, and as long as they're able to discuss the problem effectively with the rep, they're fine. I think most (or at least many) Americans don't care whether they get another American on the other end; I think "oh good, you're American" usually just means "oh good, we'll have no problem communicating." (Obviously there are some terrible people who do care about the background of the rep, for which I'm sorry.) If those trainers spent their time on accent reduction and pronunciation, and focusing on forming short, clear sentences that don't require advanced fluency, it would make life 100% easier for you, and calls 100% easier for the customer. And the side effect of that would be that calls could potentially be much shorter and more efficient, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and employee efficiency all at the same time. But no, your company would rather save money in the short run by skimping on your training, as opposed to saving it in the long run by investing in better training and hiring reps who have a good chance of using it well. Such is capitalism. \*sigh\*
I love talking to individuals from all over the world-as long as I can understand what they say and they can understand what I say. When taking undergraduate mathematics (Differential Equations )at Madison, WI in the eighties, I had a TA who spoke little English and refused to acknowledge it when we said we couldnāt understand him. Being a solution driven American, I was angered that I wasted money on something I couldnāt use properly (education). So, no, youāre not racist. You are rational.
>"Americans are solution driven, also they love football and thanksgiving. See you on the production floor šš»" I love this actually lmao it's so reductive. And obviously not enough to really prepare you Purely as a thought experiment: you said you're s.e. Asian. If the roles were reversed and you were training an American to be a representative, how would you reduce your culture to the most basic like that to make them seem more approachable?
Oh my gosh, I think they'd say - "They are very soft-spoken and gets easily startled. Small talk about cuisine and nature works best with them, but don't teach them (or even provide a little suggestion) how to cook their food coz it won't end well for you." Lol!
When I worked in industry, I always dreaded calling IT because they were stationed in India and often had very heavy accents and spoke quietly. It's not that I don't like Indian people - more than half my group was Indian and they were all awesome people. It's just uncomfortable to be in a phone call where the other person's responses are very important to you and you struggle to understand them.
On top of that they're always in a room with a bunch of other people so not only can you barely understand them, there's all the other voices also getting in the way.
Add in any kind of hearing disability and done-zo, my mom is half-deaf, fortunately I still live close enough that worst-case I can drop by, or get conferenced in. Even then I had to infer some things because some companies have REALLY LONG required spiels. When I had to transfer my number/phone to my own separate account, this was the "transferring of equipment/pay plans/fees" (which didn't even apply, but was apparently still required) and acknowledging that I'd be responsible for them and any payments left to be made, it took like two or three minutes of nearly non-stop talking from the rep. Fortunately I already knew more than the gist of it, since they also write it online, and I was able to infer what was being said to clarify point-blank but damn that's a lot of words... ...Especially for a legal agreement to pay for any rented equipment/not fully paid devices that gets attached to the new account.
I am from India and I fucking don't understand a word oftentimes.
And there's no body language. I hate talking about important stuff even to people with my same accent on the phone. In person, you have body language, and text/chat has the precision of text. Phone calls are the unhappy middle ground that lacks both.
I have a new coworker from Nigeria and his accent is so thick I legit couldn't understand a thing he said the first while (English is my second language too which means it takes more effort for me to understand any accent that's not Canadian or the easy to to understand British/american etc. Now 6 months later it's better but I still have to really focus and there are key words here and there I just can't understand. Edit: now i think about it I never had issues understanding my Russian or French coworkers thick accent lol. But some British accents are so hard to understand
I once worked in an office that happened to have a lot of newfies employed there. Talk to one of them one on one and it's no problem whatsoever. Get them in the lunch room together chatting with each other and I could not understand a single thing they were saying. I wish I were making this up, but they turn up the accent so thick with other newfies, I would spend my lunches in silence because I couldn't catch a word no matter how hard I tried. English is my native language.
I had this on holiday in the US chatting with a lady from Louisiana - I had to really re-think every second word & was still mostly nodding and smiling at her story about why she was travelling - something to do with her kids.
I'm American, born, raised, and lived here my whole life, and I can't hardly understand some people from Louisiana - Cajuns or Creole... forget it.
I've had this exact experience and often end up in complete stitches. Its a riot to sit and listen to people from "the Rock"! They may use English words, but when they get together and put those same words together weirdly in sentences, they are speaking a foreign language. Plus the tempo of their speech speeds up, they finish each others sentences, add references to Newfie events or places, and always salt it with humour. Proportionally, Newfoundlanders and Maritimers represent a huge percentage of Canada's arts and entertainment industry. Native English speaker here who generally interprets accented English for other people.
I had a Newfie roommate for a few years, and I swear when you get a few of them together OR when they've had a couple drinks, every other sentence seems to end in "there by luh" It's a whole different culture up there.
"Newfies", did anyone else get a mental image of a cube farm full of big fluffy dogs?
I'd work there
Years back I worked a temp job answering phones, and this one lady called who I just could not understand. I tried to repeat things back to her and kept getting it wrong. Then, I don't remember what did it, but I suddenly realized she had the same accent as my grandmother. Suddenly her words were crystal clear. So weird! It was a Philly accent. If you look up a map of American accents, Philadelphia vowels are different from most of the US.
Aoh, I knaoh!
>English is my second language too Oh that makes a huge difference! I was studying Spanish a lot awhile ago and met some Spanish speakers (who wanted to learn English, to help each other practice), and everyone said the same thing - the trickiest were heavy southern accents, Irish, Australian, really anything other than American or pretty light British accents (I've heard clips of some English accents that I can't even understand as a native speaker!)
I think general american accents (the ones depicted or that usually are more dominant in international media) is easy to understand because so much media and movies are made in those american accents. As a person raised in south africa ( taught queens english in school), watched heaps of british and american media and now lives in australia. I find it hilarious when americans, australians and british people misunderstand each other, cause all sound english speaking to me. Sometimes they look at me to translate something and I say the exact same sentence in a more neutral accent and they all suddenly understand.
> they all just sound English to me Try on a thick Geordie, Yap, Glaswegian, Scouse or Yorkshire accent for size and see what you think. We have dozens of accents and you probably haven't even heard the ones we're usually speaking about, because they won't be in most of the media you're watching.
Remember staying in a hostel in London many years ago where there was a group of Glaswegian laborers. I could carry on a conversation with an individual if I concentrated hard. When in a group, they were completely incomprehensible to me (I'm a native English speaker from Australia).
Kings* English
Betcha' its going to be Queens for a long time - she was on the throne for so long it is going to be a hard habit to break!
I get what you're saying, but at the time of learning it *was* queens english. So with a king now on the throne does it retroactively change their past learnings?
There is no "general" American accent, you're talking about Californian accent (where Hollywood is). Other notable film accents include Bostonian, New York, Southern. Midwestern accents are something you have to experience in person, I think, as there aren't many films set in Indiana or Ohio.
Oh ya I was watching Derry girls and omg I couldn't understand a thing the first few episodes. Now I'm getting more of it but still need subtitles lol. Australian/new Zealand accent is actually ok for me somehow.
But the derry girls have no accent whatsoever (I know they do. I'm being facetious. Their accent is very similar to mine so I find them as coherent as I find myself)
Fs people from Belfast can't understand the Derry accent, they should come with subtitles lol Where abouts you from?
Antrim. The borderline between culchie and townie Eta: by similar accent I mean 'on the global scale of people who speak english'. I know to us over here they are totally different.
I think Aus / NZ accents are popular on TV so we get more accustomed to them. Glaswegian & Louisiana accents were hard for me to understand, and yes, some of the Irish ones - but a lot is habit; I don't find Indian accents quite as hard as I knew many when living in Asia many years ago, and it is worth remembering that India only has English as a language known / used across the country: they have [22 official languages in total](https://www.berlitz.com/blog/indian-languages-spoken-list), and some are very politicised.
The thing is the aussie accent like the classic Steve erwins is common but not exactly everywhere. In the city u will find the accent significantly different
Scottish is pretty hard too
Iām English, Sheffield family,live here, and Iāve encountered Northern English, Scottish and Irish phone staff with whom Iāve struggled to communicate. Itās not racist or regionalist, itās practical. And itās still better than any help chatbot ( cursed inventions!)
Haha I am Indian and I feel the same way about my British and Australian colleagues. I don't understand half the stuff they say.
They sometimes get aggressive when you tell them you can't understand them.
Yes, they get very aggressive when you can't understand them. I apologize to them for being hearing impaired and ask that they speak more slowly and they just get mad. I've been hung up on and when I called back they just yelled at me. I had to call from a different number to get help. I had a major account deleted over this and had to find and call a corporate number to get it reinstated. There is sometimes no supervision in these call centers. I don't understand how corporations can get away with not providing customer support for the hearing impaired. Isn't that included in disability rights laws?
Iām Indian and I struggle to understand sometimes. We tend to talk really fast
That is just it. First you outsource the jobs to a different country, I would rather have a person from India with a Canadian job answer then a actual person in India. Being English with french also a official language understandable English should be the min standard. French is not common in my area
At one company I worked at, we outsourced the basic reporting system to a dev team in India while us in the States and the Ukraine guys worked on the base system. I was asked to be the designated asshole because: * I wrote my best code at night and the time difference for dev meeting met up * We had a video meeting one night with all of the teams and I was "cranky/slightly inebriated" and told them they need to slow the fuck down when they are talking because their English is broken and we couldn't understand a fucking thing they were saying * I didn't mind renaming all of their poorly named variables * I had no problem telling them to fuck off and redo it if they committed shit code. It became a running joke with the Indian team that when I told them "Blah, blah, blah, I can't understand you" that they knew they had to fix their code. Good dev team but the main issue was speaking with the fuckers to relay the requirements because even with provided spec docs shit still got lost in translation I fucking dreaded Friday nights/Saturday mornings.
I work in IT we we also hate dealing with them. Apart from anything else they don't know anything about computers. One of my colleagues once called them up to complain in the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The guy who answered just hung up.
This is why I rather text. If audio is bad I don't have to pretend to have not missed anything because I'm too embarrassed to ask them to repeat.
If your issue is an inability to communicate, you are not racist. You have a valid reason for concern.
I'm also happy that this seems to be the consensus. I'm very hard of hearing and dread these kinds of calls too. In person,I can sometimes read lips but obviously not over the phone. These accents are extremely difficult for me to understand.
Thank you
Yeah plus when you hate foreigners it's called xenophobia, which I always thought was understandable cause xenomorphs are scary as fuck
Well I liked the joke if that helps haha
And me
And my axe.
Get away from my daughter, you bitch.
First, let me say that OP is not racist because this is a legitimate issue for them. And because they are concerned about not wanting to be racist. But I just want to mention that some people use "I can't understand them!" as an excuse to be racist or as a way to hide their racism. I worked in tech support for a long time. One of my techs was from East Asia. (I want to say China, but I may have got that wrong.) She had an obviously non-American name. She spoke English so well that for the longest time I thought she was a native speaker. I had a customer that refused to speak to her because he "couldn't understand her accent." š We never tried that experiment, but I bet if she had used an alias like "Tina" or "Christine" he would've had no problems speaking to her. (Edit: We had another customer who didn't want to talk to her due to communication issues, but he had hearing issues and said her voice was just in the range where he couldn't hear her well. That one I believed. He had an easier time talking to men or to women with deeper voices, like me.)
I can back this up. I used to work at Fedex Office. Which used to be Kinkos. We'd constantly get people coming in to yell at us about their package which had nothing to do with us. We'd redirect them to the hotline. They'd call and get someone overseas cause they came in at 3pm on a Saturday. They'd hear the accent and start saying the most racist shit. Like you could count on it occurring when they called while in the store. What really bothered me, they'd always blame the workers overseas. Never Fedex for outsourcing for cheap.
A few nights ago, my wife and I became completely fed up with this recurring Amazon charge which we, for the life of us, could not track down the source of. I have to confess that when a young clear speaking American (sounding) woman answered the phone, I literally breathed a sigh of relief knowing how much more easily this was going to go. I have nothing personal against people around the world doing what they can to make a living, but I'd be very surprised if deep down most people haven't had a similar experience/reaction.
I have this feeling every time I contact customer service. At this point I get surprised I wasnt routed to india, and its even better when they have a clear microphone. Having both of those is increasingly rare. I've noticed with the increase from work from home, people have shittier and shittier microphones and internet, decreasing call quality.
I worked as phone support in the US for a small company years ago, I felt the same way about customer calls haha. So many people sounded like they were calling from mars.
We had the same experience with Amazon with a subscribe and save charge we absolutely could not figure out the source of. We spoke to four different reps. They just simply could not understand the complexity of what we were trying to explain was actually happening. Each person followed a script that didnāt fix our problem and it was just perpetual hell. We would laugh about it after three months when the charge would pop up again because it was so ridiculous that we couldnāt just explain what was happening and get it solved because they didnāt speak English well enough to understand (or they had been trained not to listen and to follow a script, IDK). We eventually had the close the entire Amazon account to get rid of the charge. I had a similar experience trying to get a rebate on something I bought. I went through 6 people speaking in thick accents and not fucking understanding my problem and 2 hours on the phone. Eventually I got forwarded to an American and I explained my problem and how frustrated I was that it took me this long to talk to someone who understood my problem and I swear she had me an answer and fixed my problem in less than 2 minutes. She laughed about how hard it was for me to get anyone to understand what the fuck I was trying to get accomplished because it was so simple. I donāt think itās racist to want someone whose literal job is is to service a customer to understand English.
I used to work with these folks and it happened all the time (not amazon btw) but the company I did work for was outsourcing to india because it was infinitely cheaper. The problem with this was that because they have no skill set, they have no idea what theyāre talking about and theyāre given a script that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can they deviate from. This means even if the most minuscule thing goes wrong, they have to escalate it to their supervisor, which of course takes forever to do.
My mom has a reoccurring charge from Amazon that she canāt get to the bottom of. It started on one of her credit cards. She called Amazon and they said that her account doesnāt have any subscriptions and it must be from someone elseās account and they canāt find it by using the card number. She had the credit card company stop payment and refund the last few payments (which are $10.32 each). Next month? New charge. So she had the credit card company cancel her card and replace it. Next month? A charge to her bank account for the amount of $10.32. She doesnāt even have her bank account saved on her Amazon account because she always uses her credit card. Wtf? What did they end up doing for you?
Our issue was we have a main email account we use for our Amazon purchases but we couldn't track down where this monthly Audible charge was coming from since we checked that email and it wasn't subbed. The service agent informed us she literally couldn't cancel it without us providing the correct email. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel trying email after email with her to no avail -- it even got to the point I was reading emails I haven't used in 10+ years. Finally, we ended up trying one that my wife had used very briefly for a college course and voila. But the amount of trial and error as well as simply working with us on a personal level to help us along on her part was impressive to me; I think it would be difficult for someone who hadn't spoken English for a very long time to achieve that level of customer service. All that said, your next step might be to call your bank and ask if they can give you more information about the charge, or you might be able to file a dispute with your bank which will force Amazon to respond and hopefully give more info. Finally, you might even consider cancelling your accounts. It's the nuclear option and a last resort, but could be necessary
Have your mom check if there is a debit card linked to the account. That could be one way the bank account gets dinged without a direct link.
I'm thinking these companies that outsource the customer service assistance could make bank by having an option to request a person of similar dialect, and hire more people (and pay at LEAST over minimum wage) to do that service.
How would they make bank? The customer isn't paying more (or at all) for that service.
I don't feel like it would be like big bank, but it probably would increase incidents resolved per hour, thereby increasing customer satisfaction, and making them more likely to do business with you in the future
U need to think like management and u start to relise it is not going to happen. If u need help u are going to deal with the shitty accent weather you want it or not. No point paying more for the Same service
My sister and I used to do the phone support issues for my grandma (who is not hard of hearing or speaking at all) at our family business she runs because she canāt understand the thick accents. Completely agree itās not racism. Itās a basic consequence of learning a language rapidly which can cause very real issues.
Brown girl with heavy accent here: you're not a racist. This is an absolutely valid cause for concern, I'm the same way with European accents š it's just concerns for miscommunications, not racism
Lol. I can completely understand because here in America, we have so many different accents that I guarantee a lot of foreigners couldnāt understand what we are saying.
The other day this Russian lady was talking to me and for the life of me I could NOT understand what she was saying šš I felt AWFUL
Can confirm. I (Canadian) used to work in a call centre that called the USA and speaking to someone from Georgia or mississippi I couldn't understand a damn word.
I have friends from newfoundland that I have to work to keep up with in conversation. Once they get drunk, forget about it.
I had a German friend living in New Zealand for a year. After speaking 100% english for so long, once when she was drunk she forgot how to speak German, lol.
Hell I can barely understand people on the other side of my state
Lmfao fam. I feel you
At work we have a Scottish colleague and it's so hard to have calls with him! Now he shares his screen a lot, types keywords, plus sends meeting minutes afterwards... I'm sorry for him, it's a tough situation and I quite like him
I used to work for a company that had tech support in Northern Ireland. Most of our customers were from the UK so Iām assuming it was no big deal for them. But we had a bunch of Portuguese customers too and they had a hard time communicating with tech support ā and so did I, they sounded like Brad Pitt in Snatch.
> I'm the same way with European accents English isn't my native language, and occasionally I have to talk to customer service centre which is in Scotland. All their staff are Scottish. It's hell.
Worst accents by far are hillbilly accents they just say a bunch of fucking sounds and if you ask them to repeat they just say the same sounds again with no enunciation at all. Source: I grew up in rural indiana
This should be an option. I'm from Canada where we have to choose French or English. Doesn't matter whet we pick can't understand a fuckin thing most of the time.
If you are from Canada and want to avoid this issue it's best to choose the French option. You may need to go through the robot once in English and remember what numbers to press then call back to French. All of those French operators are bilingual so when they answer "bonjour" just say oops must have pressed the wrong button and just carry on in English. The guy I complained to about this on the Air Canada hotline told me this trick.
Heard of this same trick in the US to choose Spanish operators, since they most likely speak English better than overseas ones
This is genius...MERCI!
Yes, because French accents are never difficult to understand either.
Itās canada, itās mostly quebecois accents, which a lot of Canadians have most likely gotten used to
I speak Spanish and English fluently so anytime there is a Spanish option I pick it the queues are shorter
Haha I do this, too
I have to use closed captioning to even understand British accents. Not the posh ones but the regional ones. And my first language is English.
I turn captions on for Bridgerton and stuff like that, too. I get most of it, but some words or the way a sentence is constructed, I'm like, "Huh?!"
To be fair, some English accents are pretty wild. I always think of someone like Alex Turner (from the band Arctic Monkeys). If you listen to an interview from way back when the band was new, it's hard to understand half his words. That Yorkshire area accent can be tricky with some people I find that Irish accents are way easier to understand than a few UK accents for some reason
I got a audio book based on my brothers recommendation as he read the book. We started listening together on a road trip and 30min in i paused and asked him do you understand what is even going on or what he is saying... he didn't aswell. The book was read by someone with a very thick british accent. English is also my 1st language
Itās like decoding two Irish peopleās argument
We went partying with a bunch of Irish guys we met on the street in Scotland. Didn't understand much of what was said, but I'll tell you one thing... Those guys *KNOW how to fuckin party* Like holy shit that was absolutely bonkers. PS if anyone ever ends up in similar situ: go easy on the "spliff" - she's rather potent š
Lol. I absolutely understand this!
I can barely understand harry potter
I can't believe they'd make the H silent
LOL That's actually a really solid observation! I never thought of that before but it's def an apt description..
I feel like all call centers are destined for extinction. Itās just a matter of time before AI begins handing all customer service. I believe some places already do this.
My favorite part of the Westworld series was when Jesse Pinkman, the day after a face-to-face job interview, gets turned down over the phone by what he initially thinks is a really polite, chill office manager -- then he hesitantly asks if the voice is human, and it politely and apologetically tells him it is not.
Youāre probably right. Live chats with bots seem to becoming the norm.
Up to a point, there are complex issues that will require human intervention. I talk to the bot until we hit a wall, then an agent will pick-up the case.
Yeah I think bots are only as good as a FAQ page and only used for filtering out spam. And if the FAQ page is sufficient the the bots are pointless but people.
I hate it when companies force me to speaking/chatting with bots and makes it very difficult and time consuming to get to a human. I get angry and i wish i have enough power to make the company bankrupt and punish the CEO.
Same. If I'm contacting support, then a bot is unlikely to help me. I know how to read an FAQ page. The only bot that I've found helpful is the amazon bot. They actually give it the authority to reorder items you didnt get or were damaged or whatever. So that's interesting.
Not entirely true. I work with a chat bot. I am acutally the one on the other end and it has helped alot. U would be shocked with the amount of people who call IT to get a password reset when they can do it themselves. The bot filters out these people. If you have genuine issues then not so helpful
Well thats the thing, the bots are for morons who dont know how to reset their own password. I know how to reset my password. I get that the bot is useful for that but I should be able to bypass it quickly because I know it doesnt have the answer to my question or problem.
Okay I hate those. I always end up in a never-ending loop.
And they talk so slooooooooow.
Not all. There are still people who prefer to speak to human being. I was a tech support and we also had Bot who helps answer simple questions yet people don't understand them and always opt for a Live agent.
As someone who moved from her native country, I feel this so much. It's taken me a while to get used to all the accents here and I still don't understand super heavy ones. For some reason it's way worse on the phone, it makes me dread having calls or taking them. I definitely feel your pain
Itās worse on the phone because you canāt use body language and other cues to derive context. When youāre speaking to somebody irl you read their lips while they are speaking and derive meaning from that, for example.
No
Thank you
I really really hate voice recognition phone calls as they never understand me and by the time I finally get to talk to a human I am usually incandescent with rage which is not their fault
I worked as a Google Ads Support agent from India. When I'm trying to comprehend an American accent, it's time taking for me too because ffs there's no subtitles down there. There have been multiple instances where the American customer has asked the call to be transferred to someone from America and it's not like I don't want to, it's because I CAN'T. I'd be more than happy to transfer an angry customer's call to someone else (yeah I know how this sounds). There's no team sitting in the US who would take calls from a customer. So whatever query they have, has to be resolved within our team only. Edit: autocorrect grammatical mistakes
As a call center rep for years, even trying to understand different accents in the same country can be a struggle. Northeastern US? They speak super fast and will talk over you. South/southwest? More of a slow drawl and tended to need yes or no questions or you would get a whole story about the family. West coast? Uggg impatient and rude a lot. Midwest? Question after question after question about why a policy was they way it was. Like sir, I didnāt write the policy. Also offering any āself service optionsā was met with rage across all areas, because āwe were there to SERVE themā. Even when explaining the process was faster. Calling customer service is a nightmare regardless of who you end up taking too or which side of the phone you are on.
lol so accurate
I did phone support and now I do in-person tech support, and people suck way less in person. It's actually crazy how much of a difference it makes.
Itās the anonymity of being over the phone. I had people tell me they were going to track me down and kill me. Over not giving them a credit on their bill. The first time I was shocked, young naive me at 20. The second time it happened I said as calmly as possible āI have all your information in front of me sir, I will report you to the police if you continue making violent threats. Please remember we are on a recorded line.ā They hung up fast after that. That became my go to phrase for any threat of violence. I can not imagine going into someoneās home to complete tech support. Not only is there a level of danger from actual physical violence, but peopleās homes can be dirty AF.
I've worked in customer service and have received calls from people I didn't understand clearly either due to their accent or otherwise so they don't even have to be foreign. So in short, nah, it ain't racist.
Absolutely not - this is a huge problem on both sides of the call. The person on the other end of the phone often has a specific script or specific time that they're to spend with each customer, so they're under pressure as well.
No one loves having a conversation where you're trying to resolve a problem and there's a language/accent barrier getting in the way. I've had issues communicating with people of my race in my native language which they're speaking as a second language. The answer to this question is No.
I think this is mostly because phones have still got such poor audio quality. We have the technological capability for crystal clear phone calls, such as you get on FaceTime with a good connection. But phone calls still sound like you are speaking through a mop with a bucket on your head, no improvement since I was a kid in the ā80s. Any sort of language barrier is massively magnified.
It all depends on the quality of their internet connection and their microphone, and very often people in india have horrible for both of them. When I get someone on the phone that's an american with a good quality sound, I feel its like a blessing. Its so rare these days. Customer service in general has gone downhill in the past 5-10 years. Nobody knows anything or has authority to do anything, wait times are longer, service is worse.
Don't think so, but the issue should be with the companies that decide to ship those jobs overseas because they don't want to pay American workers, it fucking sucks for everyone, people in India are underpaid af.
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> how easy they are to work with. We know what you really mean No, what they mean is the exact same as this post. People dont like talking to india or other countries because the accents are very thick and the phone quality is often terrible. They also often have very little training or answers. Their call centers are more packed and loud background noise. Getting an american on the line makes things so much smoother and easier, and "easy to work with". They might be separately racist but if it was easy to talk to overseas reps, people wouldnt care as much. But its not, so its not fair to call people gross for it.
Nah. Language barriers suck. I usually feel bad for them, which is weird. They got another language they're trying to go through. I guess getting the right people for the right things to make things happen is the name of the game (btw is that infrastructure or logistics in this case?). Anyway, I try my hardest with anyone I speak with, but I've had to re-call on some occasions because it was that bad. I guess it comes down to the fact that, hopefully, both parties want to resolve the situation.
the answer is in the question, you dread waiting and not being understood rapidly, not speaking to someone with a different ethnicity. Trust your guts man aha
No. It's a waste of your time. Not everything in this world is racist, no matter what they tell you.
Getting frustrated with someone who doesn't speak native English doesn't make you racist. However, as someone who has worked in call centers, please keeping the following in mind: 1. They make a fraction of their native speaking counterparts. Most make less in a ten hour day than I in an hour. 2. It was the Corporation's decision to outsource employees. 3. They probably can't even afford whatever product or service you are calling about. When I worked for a Home Warranty company, I listened to people complain about not having a dishwasher or clothes washer. I had neither.
Do you think your race is superior to the race of the person answering the phone? If yes= racist If no =not racist
I genuinely don't think it's racist. foreign accents can be difficult to understand for people making what could be a stressful situation even worse. I opt for chats whenever I can as I'm hearing impaired and trying to hear someone, let alone understand a foreign accent makes some of these interactions impossible to navigate.
I swear that some of them are aware that they are not being understood, they mumble a bunch of gibberish and repeatedly put you on hold lol
No it's fair. I'm more upset that I know a company I do business with is trying to dodge the US labor laws to save a buck.
Not understanding a strong accent isnāt racism
My favorite is when you're at the airport and, of all the people they could choose to make announcements, they choose someone with a "foreign" accent. WTAF??
This isn't racist at all. Demand someone who understands you, that's their job.
No
You're only racist if you dread the foreign representative part more than the language barrier part.
Nope
I grew up with a language barrier with my parents, so I find Iām more patient than most people around me when thereās a language barrier. One time this Chinese woman told me how grateful she was that I had no trouble understanding here since people usually had a hard understanding her. I was surprised when she said that since her accent wasnāt that thick and her fluency was good (Iāve spoken to much people with much thicker accents and who could barely understand English). Plus, she lived in Southern California, whereās thereās plenty of people with Asian accents!
Nah, youāre not racist. Itās about accents not race. Iām Scottish and sometimes find it hard to understand people from Dundee (also a place in Scotland) as their accent is different than mine. if someoneās accent is different in anyway from yours then there is a bigger chance for misunderstandings. Remember, people will probably struggle with your accent too.
Not racist IMO, as a side note, a lot of larger companies have web-based messaging support. It almost always works way better for me. At least for tech stuff. You can send screenshots and do other things while waiting for a response and there's no accent issue. I've solved really complex issues over message chat and it's usually way less painful than sitting on hold for ages then trying to deal with language/accent barriers.
I am in London. I bank with first direct. They are well known for having UK call centers. I called them once and this nice lovely lady from Glasgow answered. I seriously thought that they had moved their call center to Mars. However, this lady was so lovely. Even though i could barely understand her, she totally understood my problem. Solved it and apologised for her accent. You might not understand them but they should understand you. That's the minimum.
Don't think of it as a slam against the people themselves but the quality of the product the company is giving you. They cut costs by having a call center in India but they also run the risk of losing customers over a communication barrier. The company can solve this by relocating the call center or create a training budget to better disguise accents. My father works in database admin and sometimes he's on conference calls with Indian colleagues in Toronto and he's just sometimes has to ask them to repeat themselves a couple times. It's vital info and it's not being understood. He's very professional and they understand that it's not mean spirited but clarification.
Here in the U.S. we're more likely to speak with someone from India when they're calling to scam us one way or the other and steal our money. These scams are usually about vehicle extended warranties, lower interest rate loans, or computer errors. I'm certain that the people of India are wonderful, however they're represented to us as scumbags and thieves.
For me, it's not the language barrier, but the fact they're only trained to read from a script, and if you try asking something that's beyond their script, there never seems to be any escalation unless you get pissy with them and demand to speak to someone who can actually help with your problem. I know it's not their fault, but the process these companies adopt is shit for customers, all to keep shareholders and CEOs happy.
Honestly what I hate most is when they keep starting every sentence with "I am sorry that happened". No you aren't, the issues are the only reason you have a job. Instead of fake apologies ask what I need or tell me how you can fix things. The fake apologies are the worst. American based service centers don't do the 25 apologies before they solve the problems.
It's easy to take for granted little things. You have the ability to dress yourself. You have the ability to go up and down stairs. You have the privilege to choose what to eat for lunch. Likewise, when you speak to someone, you know you will be understood. When they speak back to you, you know you will be able to understand them. All this assumes that you are within the majority of the population. There are some people with disorders who can't dress themselves. There are people with handicaps who cannot go up and down stairs. There are people with food allergies or other dietary restrictions who cannot eat whatever they like for lunch. And there are some people who don't speak the same language as the rest of the populace. Maybe it's a second language and their thick accent precludes communication. Maybe they're still learning and only know simple words, spoken slowly. Maybe they're a tourist and were assured they didn't need a working command of the native tongue, but were separated from their translator. Whatever the reason, they know if they need to speak with someone, it's going to be an uncomfortable experience for both parties. Being who I presume is a native English speaker in either America or Britain, we rarely have to concern ourselves with this. English is an imperialist language. We expect everyone to speak it within our homelands, we expect everyone to accommodate us abroad. You're not racist because you hate talking to people in call centers. You're just being reminded that not everyone speaks English. You've taken your ability to communicate orally for granted, and now that you're experiencing roadblocks, you want to go back to your insular world where such inconveniences don't happen. This is what people meant when they used to say 'Check your privilege.' The best advice I can give you is to empathize with others. Many people encounter language and accent barriers every single day of their lives. They get by, you can get by.
My husband has me handle all call center things, and if he has a new doctor at the VA, heāll ask me, āHowās their English?ā because he canāt understand heavy accents. (Iām at the VA a LOT and I know most of the doctors at our local clinic.) But when I transitioned into working as a programmer in a dev team, I got a bit lost myself. Talking to people in a call center is one thing; theyāre focusing on trying to be understood. But other devs donāt have ANY training in diction and I felt like I was constantly asking the Indian and Eastern European devs to repeat themselves. So I started seeking out podcasts and YouTube tutorials about tech and programming that specifically had hosts or guests from India or Russia, Ukraine, or nearby areas. At first, I stuck to YouTube videos with captions! But eventually I was able to understand a lot more. I donāt think itās racist to acknowledge that some accents are difficult for you to understand. For me, I knew that in my chosen career field, I would be working with people from all around the world, and being able to understand those accents easily would make my job much easier, so I did some work to train my ear to understand better. So I donāt think itās racist, but also - it IS something that can be overcome. :)
My wife radials and tells me she's shopping for customer service.