Cultural Blunders in Call Center Telesales
September 16, 2008 · Print This Article
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By Cindy King
There has been such a sudden interest because of cultural differences in customer services expectations. You must wonder if companies are feeling the cultural backlash of outsourcing to countries where the culture is just so different that it impacted customer service expectations.
The first reason this could be true
In many households not a day goes by without getting one sales call or another. These calls are often made at meal times from a wide variety of international call centers trying to sell one thing or another.
Personal experience says that about 5% of them polite. About 25% of them are outright rude. The remainder are somewhat apathetic.
These call center agents do not share the definition of politeness as many Europeans and North Americans.
Where do I find them lacking in politeness?
1. They call just at meal time, and don't they ask if it is convenient to call.
2. The new phone systems often leave the people being called waiting with a blank line for over 10 seconds before the call center agent "answers" the phone their end. They called first and expect the people they call to wait. Why?
3. When the call center agent does start speaking, they speak very, very slowly obviously trying to read a name for the first time.
4. They can't pronounce many family names.
5. After the painfully slow beginning, they immediately jump into a long sales pitch without giving any space to interact.
6. Very often they refer to themselves as a partner to the electric company. Partner? Hold on. The electric company has their clients address already. If you are their partner, exactly how you are their partner? Tell me that first.
7. They will often ask for some personal information in the third sentence. That is 15 seconds after we have established a correct name.
This scenario happens to me every week day. Sometimes twice a day. And I'm sure it happens to others in other countries.
What happens afterwards is often an example of customer service expectation clashes. These types of sales just do not work on many clients. Why? Probably all 7 reasons are above. The clash?
This is when the clients tells the customer service person on the other end they are not at all interested and never will be no matter how good the offer is.
The reactions are so… colorful? Nothing like what North Americas or Europeans would expect.
The so called partner to the electric company will actually tell off the prospective client. Clients have been told me to get an unlisted phone number to save the call center agents time. these misguided call center agents have been lead to believe that a listed phone number means the person wants to listen to sales pitches. Mainly at mealtimes.
Call Center agents have a difficult job
Call center agents must learn how to pronounce names from a different country. Most people can understand just how difficult this is to do. It is hard. It takes weeks, sometimes months. It's one of the ways you can tell if someone has had enough of the right foreign exposure.
The call centers have a sales script for their agents to follow. This is not easy. It's not easy to make a script sound natural, nor is it easy to deal with questions. And, the vast majority of people called are just not interested.
After the agent has done all of this, their own culture and personality shows through in the way how they react to people like who say 'no'.
Cultural Perception
Yes, we all have different cultural perceptions of things, concepts… and other people. And we cannot change this over the phone.
We also have very different definitions of politeness. Even when you think you have the same definition of politeness cultural blunders can pop up… due to differences in politeness.
What should the Telesales people work on even more? Probably adjusting their communication to meet the definition of politeness in the country they are calling.
It will be interesting to see if there are still as many phone calls like this 10 years down the road. Especially since there are so many other ways of tele-marketing.
One Alternative
Let's look at one alternative scenario. The web marketing companies will provide telephone numbers of qualified leads only an hour old. The person qualified himself online just minutes before a call center agent get his telephone number. The person is probably sitting next the the phone number they listed. They are interested in the product in question (and they are not eating dinner!)
Now who would you want to call that 100% fresh qualified lead?
Wouldn't you want your best sales person? The one who could communicate best with him?
Surly there have been a handful of calls like this, even if there was not any real strategy behind the marketing. But an English mother tongue person living in France can be called by a person from Ireland. A real sales person. With an interesting dialog.
There is more than one point to take out of this example. Let's just say for now, that I think relevance helps a lot in smoothing over any cultural differences in telesales. Cultural differences will always be part of outsourcing issues, but telesales must evolve beyond them.
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Cindy King is a Cross-Cultural eMarketer & International Sales Specialist, aligning businesses with different cultures. She has over 25 years field experience in international business development and helps mid-sized business owners create international business development strategies that shorten time to profitability.
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