Wanted: With American Accent

By Bobbit Mariano

A job hunter who consider working in a call center may find difficulty in applying to such position particularly if the job description entails not only must have a good verbal and written communication skills, but must also have an American accent.

Newspaper job advertisements have emphasized the need for such requirement since the bulk of Business Outsourcing Clients came from US. Thus, a customer care should have an American sounding tone.

Human Resources personnel, then first requires the applicant to read a list of English words to determine on whether or not they have the so-called American accent. In the Philippines, applicants who live in the southern region usually failed the first stage of application process due to their strong regional language dialect as compared with those living in Metro Manila.

And true enough, applicants pronounce the English words differently. American accent, on the other hand, is totally different from British or Australian tone.

But having an American accent does not guarantee the success of an applicant, a hopeful customer service representative (CSR) must also hurdle the second stage of passing the English written exam, and finally the third step which is the listening skills.

Clearly, the competency of a CSR does not depend on having an American accent alone. The customer care must also be polite,courteous and have a long patience in dealing with difficult callers or clients. To increase the level of competency of the representatives, most of the established BPO companies have even funded a comprehensive training on verbal communication skills, hiring professional trainers for their employees.

English trainers share the process of learning the sound system (or phonology) of a language or dialect. The methodology involves several steps, including assessing your current accent for trouble spots, or non-standard patterns and habits, changing the way you form your mouth to form vowel and consonants sounds, modifying your intonation and stress patterns, and changing your rhythm.

An experienced customer care has stressed that if all foreign call centers were staffed with representatives who were given the proper training, tools and procedures, then off-shoring would not be such a hot-button issue for so many consumers.

The CSR added: “I don’t believe there are intrinsic ethnic or cultural barriers to providing good customer service, but I do believe many foreign call centers are not properly staffed and trained.”*