Please let me speak
the torment of East Asian "tech support"
Once again, I’m on the tech support carousel over an Internet question. Today I’m recapping only one of four such conversations that took place in the past day. If you find this tedious, just multiply it by four and you’ll get how I feel!
One of the problems with US companies using East Asian employees to staff their phone lines:
Yes, the language barrier is the problem, but it's more subtle than that. The way companies do this guarantees anger and frustration on the part of the customer, which is also unpleasant for the East Asian employee.
This is the only way I can get through these calls. And it's torture. Note that I have a clear, articulate, standard American speaking voice. I have a newscaster voice. My accent is the very accent that ESL people are shown as an example.
I am not the problem, in other words.
1. The employees have just enough English to think they can speak it, but they can't actually speak it or understand it fluently.
2. Their inappropriate confidence causes them to speak much faster than their fluency level allows and much faster than native speakers.
3. At every sentence, I have to jump in and beg them to stop speaking, then urge them to stay quiet, please, and listen to me, all the way through, without interrupting me. I lard my speech with compliments trying to make it clear that I appreciate their personal attention, that I don’t harbor ill will, but that yes I must point out a problem with the way they speak. I try to avoid doing anything that will make them feel personally criticized, but I can only walk so delicately on so many eggshells:
"Please, please-let me speak. Please let me clarify. I appreciate that you are helping me. This is not personal; you’re very pleasant and I appreciate you. But I cannot understand the words you are speaking. No--stop--please don't jump in. Let me speak the sentence all the way through."
Can you imagine how you'd be frustrated with this? Then I have to get to the next level.
"Slow down your speech please. I could not understand a single word of the last paragraph you spoke to me. You simply have to slow down, or I'm going to increasingly interrupt you, and I'm going to raise my voice to get your attention. Just listen, the way I'm working so hard to listen to you."
There's clearly a cultural problem, too. These East Asians speakers (I can't know specifically what language) obviously have a cultural prompt that makes them interject "Um" "Uh" "Uhum" repeatedly when a customer is giving them a sequence of numbers, for example.
They interrupt you constantly with affirmation noises that throw you off the sequence of numbers you're giving. It's maddening. They're not doing it to be be mean, of course, but my god, they just won't be quiet and listen.
It sounds like this:
Agent: Can you gimme account service number please?
Me: Yes. I will speak it when you tell me that you are ready to hear the information.
Agent: Ready
Me: X-zero-five [Agent: Uh! Uhhuh!] three-four-[Uh! Yes!]
Me: Please let me speak the number. I—I can’t keep my place.
Readers, it’s not me. I don’t have a learning or sensory disability. This is not the fault of some neurological problem in my brain. I am normal. A normal human brain cannot maintain focus if the other party is continually interrupting audibly. When you speak to someone, you are, at the same time you are speaking, also processing questions like this: “Can he understand me? Is he going to follow my call-and-response pattern, or do I need to adapt to his?” This goes on almost unconsciously, but it is happening during speaking.
These conversations with the East Asian employees make this impossible. There is a mismatch in spoken cadence and tonality that shuts down communication.
Am I explaining this clearly?
I work really, really hard to facilitate spoken communication with them. I should not have to do this. It’s not reasonable for American companies that I pay to force me to do this. But I do. I slow my words down. I enunciate EVEN MORE CLEARLY than I already do.
They won't follow suit. They won't return the favor.
Thank you for listening to my frustration.
I know I'm supposed to "validate myself" and all that bullshit (I hear you in my head, therapist). But nah. I do, actually, need *some* validation from other humans. I'm a social creature. Josh Slocum alone is not enough for Josh Slocum. I can't provide all my own needs.
So I thank you all very much for making it clear that you understand what I'm saying. Seriously--it really helps.
I can appreciate what you are saying quite a bit. Cultural disconnects are so much more than what most people think it is. Speaking another language is not just learning words, it is so much more in tone, cadence, courteousness, and cultural references. As a foreigner you do not know the minute details.
I think companies and larger corporations would be much better off if they understood service not as something that causes cost, but that is indeed service to the customer and for that it needs to be effective, helpful, and within the right cultural context.
Having a service person with a mismatched cultural background can indeed cause frustration. On both sides. And no-one is really to blame but the company who allows this mismatch.
I am clearly a foreigner that was raised German. It took me a long time to get to the level in English speaking I am in now.
Once my British boss said to me: "I suggest you change the title."
I heard: "I would change the title, but it is fully up to you whether you want to change it or not." I did not change the title and my boss got furious with me. What was my mistake? I translated the word suggest literally to "vorschlagen". Which in German means that it is an idea that someone proposes and it it is fully up to you to use it; no pressure. I did not know that in England the word suggest is used in the context of "you better do it or you will get fired".
It is even worse when you talk to people from very drastically different cultural backgrounds. I have the hardest times with people from certain countries in Africa, but also Italians or Indian people have a way of talking that triggers me every time. Luckily I now know that it is communication style based on culture and not personally. And many of my colleagues at work have also gained more experience with German or American culture and we now get along just fine. The learning curve was just hard to surmount.
It is sometimes still bad. For example, Germans are overly direct nearing on being rude. One of my team members spoke up in a meeting against one of the bosses. She was called out later for having responded rudely and I did not hear it that way, at all. For me, she was just assertive and I felt it was appropriate to be in that situations. I neglected (again) that many Americans prefer a softer communication style in particular from people that rank lower.