Comment by AdmiralAsshat
4 years ago
Some thoughts as a guy who worked help desk/call center for many years.
1) It's sad that we need this. However, I've talked to many, many customers that are not at all shy about being openly racist, and as long as we continue to entertain that "The customer is always right" mentality, it won't go away. I had customers who would get very hostile with my coworker adjacent to my desk who was from Pakistan but lived in the US, and often the customer would not believe that he was in the US until I audibly walked over to his desk and said in my loudest white-guy mid-Atlantic accent, "Hey, Mohammad! What seems to be the problem?"
2) I don't think this approach will work, if for no other reason than that Indian-British English has a distinctive style to it that extends beyond the accent. I once took a Udemy course (might've been on Elasticsearch?) and it was very clearly written by someone in India who then paid a white guy to read all of the slides in his American English accent. The results were hilarious, because the guy was clearly trying to do his best to make "do the needful" sound like something a Bay Area dude would naturally say, but, it simply wasn't.
3) For what it's worth, while I can immediately tell when I've called into a tech call-center based in India, I've been genuinely surprised at the relative lack of "foreign accent" when I've called into a call-center based out of Singapore or the Philippines. To my ears it sounded like non-distinct English (e.g. not quite American but not quite British either, and certainly not Indian).
It's not just racism. I cringe when I hear a strong accent on a call center call but that's not because I dislike the person on the other end. It's because it's a signal of how much the company cares about support. And as a general rule of thumb they are offshoring their call center not to increase quality but to reduce costs. And this means you're going to have fight your way through 3 layers of support before you get to anyone who know what they're doing, and has the power to fix your problem.
Of course this isn't always true. There are definitely some US call centers that are awful and some stellar offshore ones, but as a general rule of thumb this seems to be true.
But your reasoning is still riddled with assumptions, namely that "If I hear someone answer the phone with an Indian accent, it means I'm dealing with a low-skilled/low-paid outsource worker who is going to waste my time." Here's why these assumptions are flawed:
1) As I already mentioned, we had foreign-born workers living in the US, with accents. They were highly-skilled, highly-qualified, and getting the same wage as all of our other US colleagues.
2) We had coworkers in India at all levels of support, L1-L3. I'm sure payband was the motivating factor in their hire, but timezone availability was a large consideration as well. And they were eminently qualified: some of them could run circles around me from a knowledge perspective.
3) The kernel of truth which you may have touched upon and which some of our customers may have inferred is that for historical reasons, most of our L1's were in India and most of the L2's or L3's were American. So yes, if you got a guy with an American on the phone, he was probably going to be better-equipped to solve your problem--because he was an L2/L3. But the reason that guy didn't answer the phone had little to do with how much the company cares about support; it was because the L2's had more important shit to do, like filing bug reports, or code diving, or debugging. And if I'm interrupting a GDB session to take a call, I expect that an L1 has done the bare minimum of triaging first to ensure that I'm not answering a question that could have been resolved by RTFM.
We can argue all day about whether to call these assumptions "racism" or not, but I would argue that whatever their origin, they feed into that sense of customer entitlement that leads to customers screaming at my colleagues over the phone as soon as they hear an Indian accent. And that's horseshit.
I'll leave you with a final example: we had a very irate CEO customer once in a conference call for a longstanding issue, and the call on our end included several product support leads, managers, and developers. At some point we decided to bring the company's Director of Software Engineering onto the call to try to calm the customer down. The director had an Indian name and was physically in our office but was introduced by name rather than title. The CEO responded by saying, "I don't wanna talk to some freaking guy in Bangalore!"
1) There exist many high skilled and qualified foreign born workers in the US. Agreed
2) There are lots of qualified people in India. Agreed
3) Screaming at anyone on the other side of the phone is horseshit Agreed
Companies either see support as a cost center or a differentiator. Those that see it as a cost center are less likely to invest in providing top tier support and more likely to offshore their support.
Now I'm sure there are companies that offshored not to save costs but to increase quality but they are rarer. And they are hamstrung by the existing experience of customers that expect offshore support to be worse.
If for historical reasons all L2-L3 support was offshore and L1 support was onshore, then people would breath a sigh of relief when they heard the accent.
This is what it is for me.
Take, for instance, a company like Crutchfield. Their entire call center is based out of New Jersey or something like that. The important part is that it's in-house. They are all extremely knowledgeable and powerful to help you out.
If it's out-sourced to another company or country, the result is the same. They mostly can't do anything.
As a counterpoint, my company has outsourced major parts of its internal IT support to the Philippines, yet my experience is always as good as how it was before they did so.
If they can do that for internal support, it should be possible for external as well?
You might have missed the last line of my comment :)
> Of course this isn't always true. There are definitely some US call centers that are awful and some stellar offshore ones, but as a general rule of thumb this seems to be true.
Sure, but it’s much cheaper to have crap support that can’t help you. For many companies it’s a plus if they can cheaply waste your time so much you won’t call again next time.
There are people with strong accents in the US working customer service.
True, but maybe 10% of people in the US have a strong foreign accent where as 90% of people who live in a foreign country have a strong foreign accent(to the US ear).
Globalization :)
Some thoughts as a guy who has had to exist in a multicultural society.
1) sometimes people are hard to understand, especially with accents. It’s not “racist” if I prefer speaking to someone I can understand. I don’t care if they’re in the states or not, I just want to be able to communicate.
2) some accents are more difficult to understand than others. Usually, accents are easier to understand if I’ve encountered them in the past with some depth (e.g had a coworker with the same accent)
3) Corollary of (2): people who live further away from diverse areas often have less experience with this and are probably going to be more irritated hearing accents they have not heard before
4) people like to feign ignorance of (3) and pretend it’s all racism. Double points for assuming this because of the coincidence that flyover states are less diverse already, causing more irritation with accents, but we can pretend it’s racism because why assume anything neutral or positive if someone from a flyover state?
You really hit it out of the park here.
The inverse of the first point is also true. It’s often harder for the person on the other end to understand you if they’re not an English speaker leading to continually repeating yourself and spelling stuff out.
> trying to do his best to make "do the needful" sound like something a Bay Area dude would naturally say, but, it simply wasn't.
I grew up in the Midwest and hadn't encountered this phrase until I moved out to Seattle and started working in tech. Indian folks definitely use it the most, but I also hear it regularly from the American-born guys who did a stint at Microsoft in the Aughts. Given more time, it might end up being one of those West Coast-isms.
Along with “I am sending this to you timely, please revert.”
It’s just corp-speak propagation where a heavy proportion is alternative grammars.
Just remembered another: 'prepone'.
it's not racist, it's called suspicious. I have gotten too many scam calls from people speaking in a foreign accent to _immediately_ put myself on the defensive.
A company I worked for heavily invested in having all its call center staff based in the Philippines partly for the reason of accents. It's an accent that is, as you say "non-distinct" and generally considered pretty neutral by western ears.
The Philippines call center isn't that surprising to me. It was a US colony for 48 years. During US colonialism in the Philippines a school system was established with English as the primary instruction language. By 1950 20% of the population spoke English. After WWII a large portion of their media was in English. The Philippines 1987 Constitution established Filipino and English as co-official languages.
I live in an area with a lot of Philippine immigrants. Even kids that just immigrated here speak English as well as the locals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_English
Between 2 and uncanny valley problems, ignoring societal implications, I wouldn't touch this startup. Getting the tech to the point of marketable product seems doable, but getting it to where it needs to be to actually work will be incredibly hard. Text to speech has come a long way, but it's still not there, and it's an easier problem.
I worked in an Indian call center decades ago. Being yelled racial abuses was normal and expected part of the job. I got used to it pretty fast.
Curious... What does a mid-Atlantic accent sound like?
William F. Buckley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTyZAul60ok
Mr. Burns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=othBTFk_W1Y
There's an ambiguity with "mid-Atlantic".
Sometimes it means "trans-Atlantic", an accent which Buckley, Burns, and many pre-1950 movie stars spoke with (while on-screen anyway). It falls somewhere between the accents found in the USA and accents found in the UK.
In the context of this thread, I think it means the mid-Atlantic states in the US. It's close to the American "television news accent".
EDITED TO ADD: It's worth noting that the two accents called "mid-Atlantic" sound very different.
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I really like this (no longer updated) website devoted to north american accents https://www.aschmann.net/AmEng/
Old Hollywood movies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
That said, people today often use "mid Atlantic accent" to mean the standard "region-less" accent used by, for example, TV announcers. It is more and more the standard accent of America's educated elite in urban centers, regardless of location.
Generally any everyday local news host has a variation of this kind of accent. There are different regional accents around the country, but generally news show hosts tend to have a plain sounding generic American sound that may not match up with the local drawl. For example, Alabama/Georgia populations have a particular southern accent but news out of Mobile and Atlanta doesn't sound local. Similar for Boston or NYC, etc.
It's the accent you hear on TV when you think the speaker has no accent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent