When I was doing phone tech support actively, my opinion on the matter was that consumer-level tech support is already dealing with people who often do not understand the technology they are calling about, and having to relay information over the phone. These are both substantial barriers to effective communication. Further barriers to communication just make everything worse.
Any pronounced accent that the person on the other end of the call (on either end!) is not familiar with is going to make matters worse. This is the part where racism/xenophobia (conscious or unconscious) is going to flare up worst. Any time one of my heavily accented coworkers picked up a call there was a moment where no one was sure whether this was going to be one of the calls where the caller spouted abuse and wanted to know why their call had been sent to an offshore call center. This was also where the blatantly misogynistic callers would start to crawl out of the woodwork, though that process sometimes took a little longer for the less blatant ones.
English as not-first language does not necessarily even mean that it's spoken or written poorly! There's a certain sort of absolute correctness and formality that's associated with some 2+ language speakers, where they don't relax their grammar and make some of the same elisions and outright sloppy word choices that a native speaker might use.
Not comprehending the actual issues at hand, and not being able to extract from the customer the necessary details, is an actual job performance issue that needs addressing in some fashion.
For the most part, my Spanish-speaking interviewers from the survey hell job performed decently on English-language surveys. The one and only time that I actually had to take an interviewer aside based on accent was actually sort of hilarious after everything was resolved. The particular survey was about teens' attitudes toward tobacco use, and the introduction involved asking a parent if the interviewer could talk to a teen about "risky behavior" including a short list of items including tobacco use. Unfortunately, this particular interviewer's accent rendered the phrase "risqé behavior", and he was getting hangups on account of it. Two minutes into a 10-minute monitoring session, I drop my gear and run to pull him off the phone and into a private conference room where I summon all the tact I have and let him know that, you know the "risky behavior" part of the intro? and are you familiar with the word "risqué"? Fortunately he was, so I didn't have to explain that as well, and we had a 10-minute practice in pronouncing "risky" with more of an American accent, and he got back on the phones and I monitored him again and all was well. Awkward as hell, affecting job performance, and -- fortunately -- we could deal with it in 10 minutes. I would not have liked the process that ensued if I had had to involve any higher layer of management in it.
I know there were some people who all the supervisors basically felt sorry for and made excuses for. (Both ESL and English as first/only language.) We didn't so much intend to make the respondent feel sorry for them as we were trying to justify not firing them, because having hired them we felt sort of responsible and survey hell was the sort of dead-end job where people who were basically unemployable elsewhere would pick up.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: May 16th, 2012 04:44 am (UTC)Any pronounced accent that the person on the other end of the call (on either end!) is not familiar with is going to make matters worse. This is the part where racism/xenophobia (conscious or unconscious) is going to flare up worst. Any time one of my heavily accented coworkers picked up a call there was a moment where no one was sure whether this was going to be one of the calls where the caller spouted abuse and wanted to know why their call had been sent to an offshore call center. This was also where the blatantly misogynistic callers would start to crawl out of the woodwork, though that process sometimes took a little longer for the less blatant ones.
English as not-first language does not necessarily even mean that it's spoken or written poorly! There's a certain sort of absolute correctness and formality that's associated with some 2+ language speakers, where they don't relax their grammar and make some of the same elisions and outright sloppy word choices that a native speaker might use.
Not comprehending the actual issues at hand, and not being able to extract from the customer the necessary details, is an actual job performance issue that needs addressing in some fashion.
For the most part, my Spanish-speaking interviewers from the survey hell job performed decently on English-language surveys. The one and only time that I actually had to take an interviewer aside based on accent was actually sort of hilarious after everything was resolved. The particular survey was about teens' attitudes toward tobacco use, and the introduction involved asking a parent if the interviewer could talk to a teen about "risky behavior" including a short list of items including tobacco use. Unfortunately, this particular interviewer's accent rendered the phrase "risqé behavior", and he was getting hangups on account of it. Two minutes into a 10-minute monitoring session, I drop my gear and run to pull him off the phone and into a private conference room where I summon all the tact I have and let him know that, you know the "risky behavior" part of the intro? and are you familiar with the word "risqué"? Fortunately he was, so I didn't have to explain that as well, and we had a 10-minute practice in pronouncing "risky" with more of an American accent, and he got back on the phones and I monitored him again and all was well. Awkward as hell, affecting job performance, and -- fortunately -- we could deal with it in 10 minutes. I would not have liked the process that ensued if I had had to involve any higher layer of management in it.
I know there were some people who all the supervisors basically felt sorry for and made excuses for. (Both ESL and English as first/only language.) We didn't so much intend to make the respondent feel sorry for them as we were trying to justify not firing them, because having hired them we felt sort of responsible and survey hell was the sort of dead-end job where people who were basically unemployable elsewhere would pick up.