So often we receive emails about companies outsourcing their customer service to foreign countries, like India. Our users are completely frustrated by the impossibility of understanding some of these accents and are desperately seeking ways to avoid them.

Well, I had to laugh (or I might have cried) when I recently called a company that's located in the southern part of the US and I could not, and I mean could not, understand the customer service rep. I had to ask her to repeat each question or statement at least 2 or 3 times; "I'm sorry, but I can't understand you. Could you please say that again?"

Please understand that I'm not picking on southerners, by any stretch. I'm from the northeast, Boston area to be more specific, and I know that people often have a hard time understanding where I "pahhhk my cahh" (translation: park my car). I really have to correct my speech to include my "R's" when I'm making business calls or just want to be understood on the first try.

So, if I can correct my accent so that others can understand me, and I don't answer phones for a living, why can't customer service reps "correct" or neutralize their accents (be it from India, the northeast, the south or wherever), much like news anchors neutralize theirs? And why don't companies provide -- no, require speech and diction classes to help them do so?

It seems like a simple mathematical equation to me: Companies save money (or at least that's the goal) by outsourcing; and if they don't have understandable reps, they lose money by frustrating customers. If they outsourced, but required "re-training" for accents, they would save money, at the low cost of re-training rather than frustrating consumers beyond belief.

And, incidentally, I feel that every company should consider this issue for all employees who have the responsibility of speaking with customers...regardless of their location. For example, I called another company and got a representative located in India. He had a very slight accent that didn't interfere with our communication at all.

The issue isn't the location, or even outsourcing (at least from a communication perspective), but rather proper oversight and training; putting consumers' needs, in this case the need to understand the representative, over the company's bottom line. posted by Lorna Rankin at 2:48 PM

Today the gethuman team has published the v1.0 version of the gethuman standard.

This new standard was developed based on thousands of email exchanges and hundreds of phone calls with many of the millions of consumers who have visited the gethuman website.

The purpose of the gethuman standard is to put a stake in the ground for how large companies should design their customer service phone systems to support the needs of their customers.

The gethuman team is now embarking on an extensive set of testing for each of the gethuman 500 companies to rank their customer service phone systems based on this initial standard.

Please read more about the gethuman standard. And stay tuned, we have a lot more news coming. posted by Paul English at 11:16 AM

We recently asked consumers to tell us which features are important when calling any company for customer service. Over 4500 people participated in our survey and the results helped us to design standards for how phone systems should work. We will soon post these standards on our site and we will do monthly scoring for how each of the gethuman 500 rates based on these standards.

Thank you so much for your help. posted by Lorna Rankin at 9:33 PM

Hi all. Someone recently brought this article to my attention. Turboing refers to the actions of a customer who goes around the normal technical support process by contacting a senior person in the chain of command.

The article, describes the Art of Turboing: why you should do it, what it will do for you, and how to do it successfully.

http://www.macwhiz.com/articles/art-of-turboing.html

Hope you find it helpful. posted by Lorna Rankin at 1:17 PM