Much has been written about whether it is fair to American workers to send jobs out of the country. A more important question is whether it makes economic sense. Firms are outsourcing their customer support functions to countries where labor costs are considerably lower than the United States, but are they receiving value for money? And is it possible they are losing customers in the process? Research by Thunderbird Professor Anne Stringfellow investigates the effects of off-shoring customer-facing activities on customer satisfaction and customer defection.
A literature review by Stringfellow finds that U.S. customer complaints about overseas call center service representatives are widespread. In September 2002 , CRMDaily.com cites this example from a Dell customer: “The techs . . . . were unintelligible due to heavy East Indian accents compounded by speaking much too quickly for me to understand. . . . I am not hard of hearing. They just don’t speak American very clearly over the phone.”
In an April 2004 PC World article, author Anne Kandra says many readers are “annoyed by language difficulties when their calls go to off-shore service reps. . . . (who) often seem to be reading from a script instead of listening to details, or (who) seem ill-informed about products or company policies.” In the April 2004 Call Center Magazine Brendan A. Read claims: “The chief issue impacting off-shoring is poor cultural affinity between offshore agents and American customers, which risks customer satisfaction and retention problems.”
Customer dissatisfaction is an important concern. A recent Purdue University survey of call center users revealed that:
• 49% said their overall experience was very important in shaping their image of the company; 43% said it was somewhat important.
• 63% would stop using the company after a bad experience.
Given the high cost of acquiring customers, most companies cannot afford to risk offending them. Dell’s recent withdrawal of some of its customer support activity from Bangalore, India back to the U.S. may have been a response to customer dissatisfaction with offshore service. USAA, a large insurance company that caters to U.S. military personnel, built its reputation on service quality. It relies solely on American service representatives, even at its overseas call centers.
The majority of customer dissatisfaction appears to stem from intelligibility problems with foreign accents. However, linguistics research echoes Read’s belief about cultural affinity – for example, one finding says that the mere presence of some foreign accents can cause negative emotion in American listeners. A Japanese accent was found to be associated with negative emotions, while a Spanish accent was not. Conventional wisdom is that some accents, such as British and Australian, are more acceptable to Americans than others.
Research in psychology has shown a tendency for individuals to imitate each other’s speech, which may enable better communication. Presumably imitation is less possible for non-native speakers. It has also been demonstrated that it is easier to establish rapport with someone from a similar culture. These two findings suggest that U.S. customers may feel less well understood when dealing with off-shore service representatives. This may not be a major issue when requesting information, but could be a major barrier in more complex emotional situations, such as attempting to redress a service failure.
Other research suggests that customer dissatisfaction with foreign accents may be related to demographics and geography, with intelligibility of foreign accents decreasing with age. Tolerance for foreign accents has been found to be greater among Americans living on the two coasts than amongst those in the American heartland.
By incorporating findings from previous social science research, Stringfellow’s study aims to provide a more fine-grained understanding of the factors affecting customer satisfaction with foreign call center representatives. Key issues include:
• If the presence of a foreign accent is indeed enough to cause a customer to form a negative opinion, then much of the accent modification training currently being undertaken by foreign call center operators may prove to be a wasted effort.
• If certain accents are more acceptable than others, firms may be able to make informed cost-benefit decisions on where to site their call centers.
• If customers are more tolerant of foreign representatives on simple service requests such as verifying prices, firms may be able to route simpler calls to their foreign call centers, reserving more expensive on-shore representatives for more complex tasks.
• Finally, if the intelligibility and acceptability of foreign accents is indeed affected by age and location within the U.S., then firms may be able to profit by factoring this knowledge into their customer service decisions.
Anne Stringfellow is an assistant professor of marketing at Thunderbird. She holds a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Florida and an MBA from the University of Utah. She also holds a BSEE from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where she grew up. Her research has been published in Management Science and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. She can be contacted at stringfa@t-bird.edu.
