I recently read an article about why JP Morgan and Delta Airlines had moved their call centers out of India. They cited too many customers were complaining about heavy accents which led to poor customer service. That made me think of how the average person responds to different accents.

In one of my favorite TV programs, Arrested Development, Michael Bluth fails to detect that his girlfriend is mentally challenged because of her British accent. In many movies, like my favorite Ben Stiller movie, Zoolander, the Russian accent is made fun of with the character Katinka.

Depending on our level of exposure to different foreign accents, we may or may not be able to understand clearly what others are saying. If our exposure is limited to TV and pop culture, we may view a foreign accent in an either negative or positive light.

I think this is what happened in the cases of JP Morgan and Delta Airlines. Unfortunately, the Indian accent is not only one that few people have had a lot of exposure with, it is also an accent then is often portrayed jokingly in pop culture.

Tags: accent, Add new tag, Arrested Development, Ben Stiller, customer service, Delta Airlines, India, JP Morgan, Russian, Zoolander

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Human Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.