SUPPORTING CLIPS ON PAST COMMUNICATION BLOGS

Hi guys,

I hope you're not tired yet of reading a blog on the barriers to effective cross-cultural communication.

Now, here are three clips from You Tube, which I would like you to see.





Again, these clips prove our points in previous blogs.

Employees of call centers usually follow a script when interacting with clients. The script, which is a coherent sequence of events that they expect to follow, seemingly makes their job easy. Having a script allow them to become more conscious of their diction (slang as many non-native English speakers erroneously calls it).

Nevertheless, there comes a time when relying in script does not help at all. Second clip proves that. The agent tried to follow the script;however, the client doesn't want to. The client has been frustrated. The client wanted to have an immediate solution to his problem. It is in this scenario that the work in a call center doesn't look easy. Tension builds up, as a result, agents get's rattled. Agents become conscious of their behavior. At a call center, usually such behavior may generally be interpreted as your speech pattern. Agents, himself, becomes at the witting end of frustration. Slurs and other expletives could be thrown at each other. Composure would be out of line (clip #3). Unconsciously, non-native English agents would resort back to their normal diction, even hurl local expletives to a client.

According to Berger and Douglas (1982) these unconscious behavior may happen at these following scenario: 1) When a novel situation exist. 2) Where an external factors prevent completion of a script. 3) When scripted behavior becomes so difficult to enact. 4) When a discrepant outcome is experienced, or 5) When multiple scripts come into conflict.

Call center agents, therefore, cannot just rely on the script, which they learned and memorized during training. They have to learn the language and the culture of their clients by heart. The agent on clip#3 definitely might have thought that to be cute is the same as geniality. When the outcome was negative, he got rattled and ended up losing his "cool".

I hope that these clips would challenge those who are considering to in a call center to be seriously ready. Definitely, with the outsourcing of big industrial companies, more call center agents are needed. Are you ready?