Given the growing numbers of people from varying countries working at call centers, verbal interactions with non-native speakers have become more commonplace. During these encounters, customers sometimes base their perceptions of a representative’s ethnicity, social class, and education on the way they sound. As a result, accent discrimination in customer service can influence judgments, perceptions, and actions of callers.
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How Important is Accent in Customer Service Assessments?
Inferences drawn from a customer service representative’s accent can trigger cultural stereotypes and unjustly inform a caller’s judgments about that person. As a result, a representative’s pattern of speech can often play a significant role in a customer’s evaluation of the service provided. It can also influence a customer’s willingness to work with that person to resolve an issue.
Linguistic experiments have shown listeners can pinpoint the cultural background of a person within 30 milliseconds of hearing them speak. However, even when listeners didn’t specifically recognize an accent, they can still draw stereotypical conclusions. Further, when compared to perceived same-culture service interactions, studies have shown intercultural encounters can result in reduced trust, which affects a customer’s service and quality expectations.
This can result in a customer’s unwillingness to recommend the company to others. Additionally, these people are more likely to attempt to handle issues on their own, rather than interact with someone they have negatively stereotyped. It’s easy to see how this issue can be problematic for an organization.
What’s Behind the Discrimination?
Social identity theory has long held that people tend to favor those with whom they share cultural markers. By extension, these people also have a proclivity to discriminate against those they perceive (whether justly or unjustly) to be culturally dissimilar. They feel less comfortable interacting with such people, so they tend to avoid encountering them.
Negative bias—the tendency to ascribe more weight to negative assessment cues than positive ones is responsible for this. In extreme cases, customers who think this way will either ask to speak with a different representative, end the interaction altogether, or go to a different service provider.
What is Being Done About This?
For many call centers, it is now standard operating procedure to provide accent training. Reps are trained in a variety of English-speaking accents in an effort to mitigate the potential effects of discrimination. Additionally, AI call center accent neutralization technology can shield customer service reps from potential discrimination. It can also be less costly in the long run.
Take Away
Some customers are less likely to engage with a customer service rep whose accent indicates they are from a different nation. This accent discrimination in customer service can affect customer loyalty negatively. Unfortunately it can also negatively affect an organization’s reputation for delivering high quality service. AI call center accent neutralization software can help reduce the effect of this.