July 24th, 2010 
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english-speaking call centre staff with accents. annoying?
Firstly, even though this question is going to sound racist, Im not a racist. I know everyone says that, but Im really not. I think accents are cool and that they make english more colorful and interesting. Also, I only speak one language (english) and never succeeded at learning any other languages with any degree of success, ~ so I have a lot of respect for people who have the ability to speak english as a second language.
So thats the preamble. Now my question is, when you ring a call centre (say a telecommunications or utility provider) and you get someone on the other end with a very strong accent that is hard to understand (lets say you have to ask for clarification each time somethings said, sometimes several times). How is this for you? Obviously, this situation is exacerbated if its a bad connection to start with (staticy, quiet, or muffled). How do you feel having to repeatedly ask for clarification? What do you think of this situation?
I get really pissed off when I call a customer service line only to speak to someone that swears up and down that her name is Ann Smith, but is obviously deep in the heart of India somewhere. And it’s been my experience that these outsourced call center employees don’t actually understand or speak english, they simply read the same four lines off of their pretyped script.
Any variance from their scripts and they’re just lost.
Really makes me mad that there are companies in this country that outsource because it’s cheaper then hiring people in this country.
I don’t really care about their accents… it’s the whole picture that gets to me. Maybe I’m not politically correct, but I am right.
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