« Interesting Content from Kimberlee Morrison | Main | What's a PageView (Ajax)? »

Jan 2
Music, Language and Making Offshore Call Centers More Effective, Part 2
NextStage: Predictive Intelligence, Persuasion Engineering, Interactive Analytics and Behavioral Metrics I wrote yesterday about celebrating New Year's Eve with Gerhardt, Andrea and Raresh and making Andrea laugh by speaking Romanian poorly. At the end of that post, I mentioned that a discussion on cursing in one's native language reminded me of research pertaining to offshore call centers.

NextStage's staff sociologist has been involved in a multi-year study of debranding. One element of her research involves people's interaction with offshore call centers, something I've written about in Reading Virtual Minds Chapter 2, "What This Book Is About".

A recurring theme in her research has been the customer's inability to understand the call center personnel's English due to a non-US accent. This is actually an amazingly simple problem to solve.

All the call center personnel need due is state at the beginning of the call that they know they have an accent and that perhaps they'll need to repeat things a few times to be clearly understood. Research published in Psychological Science concurs with NextStage's research on this topic. Several people interviewed in the NextStage study made non-prompted, voluntary comments suggesting that call center personnel who acknowledged their non-US English accents made for more rewarding help desk and call center experiences.

Something to think about, yes?

If there is a challenge to this simple fix, my guess is that it might be a legal one. A company's personnel openly admitting they are missing or lacking something might open that company to litigation. Fortunately (and if you're reading my posts on building a business) you're learning that I know nothing about such things. I'd be interested in your thoughts, though. Please feel free to share them with me personally via email or with readers via commenting here, as you'd like.


3 Comments/Trackbacks




» Thanks and Please don't advertise your site via comments to my blog from BizMediaScience
I just noticed that someone had posted a comment to Music, Language and Making Offshore Call Centers More Effective, Part 2. My thanks for commenting on my blog and I had a challenge with this particular post. That blog entry... [Read More]

» This isn't customer service, Part 2 from BizMediaScience
Customer Service and deBranding, Part 2 [Read More]

submit a trackback

TrackBack URL for this entry:

post a comment

Name, Email Address, and URL are not required fields.





Comment Preview

« Interesting Content from Kimberlee Morrison | Main | What's a PageView (Ajax)? »

Advertise

recent comments

    sponsored ads



    subscribe


    Prefer Email?
    Subscribe below-

    Enter your Email:


    Powered by FeedBlitz What's this?

    Current News

    Support This Blog

    blogroll


    My site was nominated for Best Business Blog!

    business social media

    Use these fast growing business social media sites to promote your business, feature your products, spotlight your business leaders, create links, and drive traffic back to your company site, all for free!

    BIZZlogos - Add your logo - free link to your site
    BIZZphotos - Add photos of your products and people
    BIZZprofiles - Submit your profile and build your online visibility
    BIZZspotlight - Spotlight your business with free links
    BIZZvideos - Videos about businesses, products and business people.
    BIZZbites - "Digg" for Business - Submit your articles and posts

    Know More Media - Management / Operations

    know more media network

    View Network Map

    Network Feed List (OPML)

    Know More Media Network
    Feed


    we support unitus

    PRWeb

    Influencer



    BizMediaScience is a member of the Know More Media network of business related blogs.

    Here are some current headlines from some of our business publications:

    ProductivityGoal

    CallCenterScript

    AdHurl

    TheBizofKnowledge

    LandingTheDeal

    CustomersAreAlways

    HealthCareVox

    BrainBasedBusiness

    TheInsurancePolicy

    MarketingBlurb