Cross-Cultural Communication Blunders
I have had a few inquiries recently about how cultural differences affect customer service expectations.
I don’t know why there has been such a sudden interest in cultural differences in customer services expectations. Let me be a little cheeky and wonder if companies are feeling the cultural backlash of outsourcing to countries where the culture is just so different.
Let me tell you why this is the first reason that pops into my mind.
I work at home. I have not yet put my telephone number down as unlisted. I have children, I’ve traveled a lot and met many interesting people. I want people to be able to find me easily if they want to. So everyone can find my phone number.
Not a day goes by without getting one sales call or another. They are usually just when I’m preparing lunch, sometimes dinner. So I do get a wide variety of overseas call centers trying to sell me one thing or another.
And I only find about 5% of them polite. About 25% of them are outright rude.
They do not have my definition of politeness, and they don’t have a French person’s definition of politeness. I can’t always identify which country they are calling from. As I said there is a wide variety of countries with call centers calling into France.
Where do I find them lacking in politeness?
- They call just at my meal time, why don’t they ask me if it is convenient to call me. I’m busy. I’m often juggling what is on the stove and my daughter’s taxi schedule.
- Their new phone systems often leave me waiting with a blank line for over 10 seconds before anyone “answers” the phone their end. They called first. I’m busy. Why am I waiting?
- When they do start speaking, they speak very, very slowly obviously trying to read my name for the first time.
- They can’t pronounce my name.
- After the painfully slow beginning, they immediately jump into a long sales pitch without giving me any space to interact.
- Very often they refer to themselves as a partner to the French electricity company or something like that and speed up. Partner? Hold on. My electricity company has my address and already sends me lots of mail. If you are their partner I want to know exactly how you are their partner. Tell me that first.
- They will often ask me for some personal information in the third sentence. That is 15 seconds after we have established my 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 me. Why? Probably all 7 reasons are above. The clash?
It’s when I tell the customer service person on the other end I’m not at all interested and never will be no matter how good her offer is.
The reactions are so…colorful? Nothing like what I would get anywhere in North America, France, Europe even.
The so called partner to the French electricity company actually told me off. She told me to get my phone number unlisted to save them time. According to her everyone with a listed phone number wants to listen to their sales pitches.
These people have a difficult job to do.
They must learn how to pronounce names from a different country. I know just how difficult it 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.
They have a sales script they need to follow. This is not easy. It’s not easy to make this sound natural.
The vast majority of people they phone are like me: not interested.
After they have done all of this, their own culture and personality shows through in the way how they react to people like me.
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 Tele-Sales 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 I will still get as many phone calls like this 10 years down the road.
I personally think there are so many other ways of tele-marketing.
Let’s look at one scenario. The web marketing companies that provide you with telephone numbers of qualified leads only an hour old. The person just qualified himself online just minutes before you get his telephone number.
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?
I have had a handful of calls like this. I’m not sure if there was any real strategy behind the marketing. But I’m English mother tongue living in France. I got a person calling from Ireland. A real sales person. With an interesting dialog. I did not notice her politeness, or rather any difference in politeness. And she did not call me while I was preparing lunch or dinner. She called me 30 minutes after I filled out a form online.
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 tele-sales.
Want do you think? Do you think tele-sales will evolve? Do you think cultural differences will always be part of outsourcing issues?
More on Cross-Cultural Communication Blunders
- Can You Prevent All Cultural Blunders?
- Should You Be Afraid Of Cultural Blunders?
- A Communication Disconnect Between Two Cultures
- Cultural Blunders In Tele-Sales
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