Poll: Service centers’ biggest problem is poor English
A new international contact center survey reveals that Americans balk more at customer service agents with poor English or hard-to-understand accents than with those who don’t understand the problem they are calling about.
Conducted for NetReflector, a provider of feedback solutions for major corporations, the research explored customer experiences of interacting with contact centers in nine countries around the world.
When asked what frustrates them most about contact centers, U.S. respondents say bad accents or poor English (29 percent) are their top complaint followed by rude or condescending agents (18 percent), being made to wait too long on the line (17 percent), or having to listen to an agent seeking to “upgrade” their services (15 percent).
“With support jobs moving to China and India, it’s not surprising that English-speaking countries’ top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives,” said Bob Hayes, Ph.D., expert in customer satisfaction measurement and author of the book Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Survey Design, Use, and Statistical Analysis Methods. “However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers’ growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.”
Consumers in non-English-speaking markets rate other issues as more problematic. For example, for the French and the Germans, waiting on the phone is the prime problem, while the leading frustration for the Chinese and Russian respondents is that contact center staff is condescending or rude.
The findings substantiate a growing trend among companies to find alternatives to counter Americans’ increasingly hostile attitudes toward overseas contact center agents, including online chat, email, and improved automated voice systems that can resolve problems more quickly. Other companies are bringing front-line customer service operations back home, but leaving their back-office processing overseas. Still, others are investing heavily in “foreign accent reduction therapy” where accents are neutralized to appeal to the English-speaking population.