Overseas Answering Service American Accent Training

"To overcome image problems, overseas call centers rush to train their employees with American Accent Training"

Recent surveys overwhelmingly suggest that customers in the United States have a negative opinion of any business that uses a foreign answering service, whether it be for customer service, technical support, and simply for after-hours answering service functions. In fact, this negative opinion gets more amplified as you move away from the East and West coasts and into Middle America and Texas.

Today, India is still the number one country in the world for hosting call centers but the Philippines, South Africa, and even China are big countries for customer service call centers as well.

Because of the negative reputations that have been built up over the past 5 years, overseas answering services don’t want American callers to immediately know they are calling another country and this can be accomplished with American accent training. In this training current and prospective employees are trained in the following areas: rhythm and stress patters, using intonation for attitude and emotion, pausing and breathing, relationship between spelling and pronunciation, accent familiarization, and listening skills.

Training is available worldwide face to face or in a virtual, or e-learning environment.

The problem is, quality control of overseas call centers quickly broke down and there are few people in the U.S. that own a computer or a piece of electronics that have not had a terrible experience with one of these foreign call centers. On a call by call basis, 90% of the callers may be satisfied after the call, but this is a business where one dreadful experience can turn a customer off, almost for life.

Too much outsourcing was done too quickly and the answering service market could not keep up. Eventually, people that should not be on the phones were hired out of desperation to keep up with the volume of calls these overseas centers were getting.

Everyone speaks with an accent of sorts, but many times it is desirable to reduce the strength of that accent in favor of a standard or target pronunciation. English speakers with foreign language influence often are unable to create the standard phonemes (sounds) of English or speak with English-standard stress, intonation or rhythm. This is because those sounds, stresses and intonation patterns may differ in their native language, leading to a “strong” accent, or an accent heavily affected by the first language.

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