Call Centres

Recently I’ve been having one or two problems concerning a bank account I have in Britain. I have several numbers for the bank that look like British phone numbers. But whenever I call, I am answered by someone in a call centre in India. This has caused me some difficulties since the problem I have really needs to be resolved by someone who is actually in the UK, yet none of the people in India seem to be able to give me a contact number for anyone in Britain. However, I hasten to add that the people at the call centre themselves are quite competent and I can certainly understand their English. Indeed it is often easier for me to understand them than people in certain parts of Britain where they have a distinct regional accent. Because salaries for Indian companies are still relatively low, call centres there which serve international companies tend to attract employees with excellent English and high educational backgrounds.

Offshore call centres (or contact centres) are the best-known face of business process outsourcing (BPO), a rapidly growing global phenomenon whereby companies transfer work to somewhere with lower labour costs. Outsourcing may be onshore: many Japanese companies, for example, use call centres in Okinawa where wages are lower than in Tokyo or Osaka. But they save even more money if they offshore services to China, where it is increasingly possible to find workers fluent in Japanese. Asian countries that have high levels of English are particularly well-placed to attract outsourced work from the huge number of companies doing business in that language. According to India’s Economic Times, BPO is now moving into higher-value KPO: ‘knowledge process outsourcing’. In the Philippines, the work done by call centres includes software development, animation for Hollywood feature films, and transcription of legal and medical documents. If you check a job-recruitment website such as mynimo.com you will find hundreds of positions being advertised for dozens of BPO and KPO offices in Cebu City alone. The Philippines has even been getting work from India.

In India itself, a growing outsourced business is tutoring for children. In the United States, face-to-face tutoring for a high school student can cost up to $100 an hour, whereas an online tutor based in India can be found for as little as $2.50. Bangalore-based Tutor Vista has 150 tutors advising 1,100 children in America. Parents pay $100 per month for unlimited hours. Tutors have an average of ten years of teaching experience behind them, most have master’s degrees, and they get 60 hours of training in American accents and young people’s slang. Rival company Growing Stars Inc. teaches subjects like elementary school maths, science and English grammar and high school algebra and calculus to over 400 American students.

Call centres around the world are often manned by young, single workers who don’t mind working at night. According to Kingsley Bolton, a sociolinguist at Hong Kong's City University, in many Asian countries the job tends to appeal to middle class females who have few safe and socially acceptable work options.Women are often thought to have better language skills and more empathy when dealing with difficult customers. Bolton’s research in the Philippines also found a disproportionate number of gay and transsexual employees who, he speculates, may be attracted to a job that can entail an element of role-play: as long as it facilitates business, phone operatives can be whoever their clients imagine them to be.

This role-playing is highlighted in One Night at the Call Centre, a novel by investment banker Chetan Bhagat that sold over 100,000 copies within a month of its release in India in 2006. The story takes place over a single night at an Indian call centre servicing American appliance users. The main characters have false American names (Shyam is “Sam”, Radhika is “Regina”) and loathe having to be servile to customers they consider less intelligent and educated than themselves. Their instructor advises them to think of 35-year-old Americans as having the same IQ as a 10-year-old Indian.

Nowadays nearly everyone knows that a call to New York or Sydney may well be answered in Chennai or Cebu, so the call centre workers don’t need to pretend that they are anywhere they are not. Last time I called my bank I had a nice chat with a man called Sayed about a local Muslim holiday in southern India. He promised to call me back after the holiday with good news about my enquiry – but I am still waiting!

English and free trade

This week I read an article in The Economist newspaper about Tseda Neeley, a professor at Harvard who believes all employees of multinational companies all over the world should be required to speak English. Her main reason is that it is more efficient. Whereas multilingualism is inefficient. The Economist suggests that there may well be good reasons for international businesses using English. For example, it is the main language of science: nearly all influential scientific articles are written in or translated into English so that people all over the world can comment on and contribute to research. The newspaper also reminds us that many multinational companies began in English-speaking countries, including Britain, Australia and, above all, America. Moreover, English-speaking countries supply over 25% of the world’s GDP. In Japan some companies already require all or many of their employees to use English. One of them is Nissan, which manufactures cars in 18 countries.

The policy started when the company went into partnership with the French car firm Renault in 1999. Since few Nissan workers speak French and few Renault employees speak Japanese, having English as the main working language largely avoids the need for translators. Another example is the huge e-commerce company Rakuten. Although based in Japan, the company has connections all over the world. According The Economist, even the menus in the staff canteen are in English. However, The Economist does not think it is a good idea to force employees use English. This London-based newspaper generally takes a free-market approach to the world, whether financial, social or cultural policies. As far as language goes, it argues that people may be motivated to learn English because of business opportunities, but there is no need to force them. A lot of Japanese are forced to learn English nowadays, whether at work or at school. But I wonder how helpful this approach is. Some linguists, such as Jean-Louis Calvet in France, compare languages to currencies and argue that some have more value in the marketplace than others. The question is whether we should interfere in the market or let exchanges take place freely.

Many people feel it is acceptable to interfere in markets in order to protect the weak and the small. In this sense perhaps there may some need to protect minority languages against the expansion of major languages like English, Spanish and Chinese. But it could also be said that making people use English whether they want to or not is an unnecessary interference in the market - on behalf of a currency that is already strong enough. Or perhaps it is just a way of helping people deal with the needs of the global economy?

Cross-talk

After spending years mastering the sounds, grammar and vocabulary of a language, we expect to be able to communicate successfully. But communication depends not only on recognising words, but on understanding the various meanings that speakers attach to them. It can even depend on silence.

If a man’s wife simply tells him “Tomorrow’s Tuesday,” for instance, it may be enough for him to understand she is reminding him to put out the rubbish. But if speakers don’t know each other very well, they may require more specific communication.

Interestingly, communication is sometimes easier between non-native speakers because they tend to avoid ambiguous or culturally-specific expressions. Conversely, people sharing the same first language may think they understand each other when in fact they don’t. If a Briton makes a joke, a Californian may think he is serious (or boring, or strange); black and white Americans can listen to the same politician’s speech but hear different messages. This kind of misunderstanding is cross-talk: speakers talk across each other rather than to each other.

In general, however, the risk of cross-talk is higher when speakers have different language backgrounds because of cultural differences. For example, many East Asians avoid direct refusals when speaking to strangers. I once interpreted for an American friend trying to sell artwork in Japan. If someone said Kentou shimasu or Ocha wa ikaga deshou ka”, it didn’t help him if I simply translated this as “We’ll look into this” and “How about some tea?” I had to explain that they were probably saying “No thank you”.

There is plenty of advice available for people visiting and

doing business in Asian countries. But it tends to contain
sweeping generalisations, such as ‘Politeness is very
important to Thais ” or ‘Chinese people hate to lose face.
As American Rachel DeWoskin found when she starred in a
Chinese TV drama (Foreign Babes in Beijing, 2005.),
no one, in China or elsewhere, likes to lose face.

Language classes generally include some kind of cultural information. But people can be very vague about what they mean by culture. It covers superficial and obvious differences such as how people greet each other and what they eat, but also differences about how people see the world that may be deep-seated and hard to change. US psychologist Richard Nisbett even claims that the different educational practices of Asia and the West produce different ways of reasoning (The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why, 2003). Moreover, teachers of English find it especially difficult to teach culture because the language is used by people from so many different countries.

We can’t learn the cultural norms of everyone who uses English. But we can increase our awareness of the causes of communication. Even before opening our mouths, for example, we should think about body language. Do we maintain eye contact? Is it okay to touch someone? When on the phone should we listen quietly or continually make noises so that the other person knows we are still there? If we talk loudly will people think we are confident, or rude? Li Yang, a popular English educator in China, tells learners to speak foreign languages as loudly and quickly as possible in order to lose their shyness. But for some people, his Crazy English may sound …well… crazy.

And what about the conversational topic? A Korean magazine recently warned against discussing marriage, relationships, health, age, religion or money with Americans, even though these are acceptable topics in Korea. So what areas are safe? The weather? Family? Most Asians love to discuss food, but whereas Singaporeans never tire of this subject, Pakistanis may find you superficial if you don’t soon move on to something deeper.