

No one wants to talk to a scriptĪ lot of offshore call centers rely on scripted conversations to make sure their agents have the proper vocabulary and knowledge to answer customers. It requires an excellent knowledge of another culture that even most intercultural communication experts don’t fully have. Accent and cultural knowledge matters! Working in a call center as an entry level employees is a far harder job that it seems for non-native speakers. Lately, India has lost a lot of call centers seats to the Philippines where children grow up hearing and speaking American English.

Phone communication can even be challenging between people from the same country. A strong foreign accent will make the communication harder, especially over the phone when voice is the only thing people can rely on. Your customers are not being racists, they are just looking for a quick solution to their problem, they don’t want to struggle. A lot of US customers will now actually hang up if they hear that they are being transferred offshore or spot a foreign accent when the representative answers. However rather good isn’t good enough! The last thing customers want is to struggle with basic communication when they are trying to get a problem solved. UK and US companies have been outsourcing call center jobs to India for a while now and Indian call centers employees usually have a rather good level of english.

I know that’s a little harsh but that’s how most customers feel and it makes them angry. It’s like saying to them „you are not really worth our well paid employee’s time, your question is probably not so hard to answer, people with little to no qualifications can do that”. Your customers know that the only reason you offshore customer service is to save money. Let’s put it this way: whenever you send a customer’s call to an offshore call center they feel like their problem isn’t important enough to be dealt with by your company directly. Offshore call centers make your customers feel disrespected The problem is different with call centers as outsourcing often means offshoring to save money on what is considered a cost center. Outsourcing doesn’t always mean lower costs and lower quality. They benefit from their expertise and knowledge without having to handle everything in-house. Some brands outsource their IT department to specialized IT firms for example. This isn’t a problem in itself it can even bring value to the company. For many years companies have been outsourcing different parts of their business.
