Customer Service and internalized racism

[terriko]

I had a not so great experience with a customer service rep on one of those live-chat things today, so I sent in a complaint after suffering through statements like "when u log in with yr used id and password what does it comes?"

I got a response back, which was nice, but it included a variant on "she's a great rep but English isn't her first language"

And while they don't really try to claim it's an excuse, it got me thinking... is our collective distaste for outsourced customer service and non-native speakers part of some internalized racism?

It's got a some of the hallmarks, but I don't really think it's the core issue. The core issue is communication and failure thereof. If I'd gotten that sentence above from a native speaker (and believe me, I've seen worse chatting with folk in games) I'd still have made my complaint that she didn't seem very professional with her tendency to abbreviate words that were already three or four letters long. It still would have been a problem that despite me telling her explicitly 3 times that I was not a student, she was still telling me to click on a "student" tab that doesn't appear in my interface and thus couldn't help me with that part of the question.

So then the question is, why tell me that she's a non-native speaker? Are you just trying to make me feel guilty about complaining about her? She still did a poor job today; it doesn't really matter to me if she's normally better at it or if it's harder for her than it would be for me. I just wanted to report that so that she could be helped with her listening and writing skills, as well as her knowledge about the differing interfaces to the system.

I'm used to making allowances for poor language skills (native and non-native speakers alike) within the university system, but when communication is the job she's being paid to do, I think it's fair for me to complain when her language skills are not at the level I expect.

In conclusion, it's always good to examine internal racism, but making a complaint about poor customer service seems fair regardless.

Comments

indeed

[(Anonymous)]

The ability to write standard English and comprehend the persons issue seem like prime job requirements. This is not just a usage of "ain't". There is also an expectation of professional demeanor. And the appropriate formality when in a business situation. And the idea that its 'outsourced' is not suppose to imply its sub-standard and that is acceptable because of it. It may be lower cost to the business but I don't care, I want people who can meet the common profile of customer service for the US. And its not informal English, bad syntax, grammar and no comprehension of my issue. Does the company think this reflect well on my opinion of them? You should not be concerned with their race and only judge on performance. You did not bring race into your opinion that I can see (but I may have the same prejudice).

[altamira16]

She is a great bot, but she is due for a software update.

[azurelunatic]

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.

Not a native speaker...

[hpa]

I'm not a native speaker of English either.

I have lots of friends who are not native English speakers, and their command of the language is just fine.

There are also quite a few native speakers whose command of the language is appalling.

"Not a native speaker of English" and "not a competent user of English" are not the same thing.

[(Anonymous)]

The primary job of customer-service is communicating with customers. Over the phone, that is done using language. Being poor in understanding, or poor in speaking the language is thus a failure in a crucial and central part of the job.

I don't see any racism in being critical of that. Nor in being critical of mega-corps which are frequently happy to charge you triple because you're in a wealthy high-cost nation, but who're unwilling to pay the high wages in the same nation and thus outsource it to somewhere cheaper.

I'm fine with either or: Either I pay more because of being in a high-cost nation, and they accept that doing bussiness here is more costly. Or I get the same service as people get globally, from the same cheap people - but then I also pay the global (lower!) price for their products and services.

The status quo feels like; "we'll demand you pay more because you're in a high-cost nation, allthough we'll do our utmost to not actually -do- anything in that high-cost country."