Thick Accents in Customer Service

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This didn't seem fitting for the Haven forum as I'm not especially upset about it. I just thought I'd post here, that from travelling into London every now and then, and from calling (outside London) the customer service departments of various companies, I find communicating with people who have thick foreign accents frustrating.

It makes it awkward for everybody - the person with an English accent AND the person with the thick/strong foreign accent.

It happens about half the time I talk to people in customer service anywhere, including ticket officers in tube stations, people serving behind the tills of shops, and calling customer services from different shops. It's not something that happens once in a while, it is pretty common in England.

I wish they would either teach them to speak and understand better English or just choose someone else more fitting for the job. The whole point of customer service is to meet a person's needs (or pretend they are). Understanding what they're saying is basics. Understanding what their customers are saying is extremely basic, they often don't understand me and often get my requests completely wrong. And I have to repeat myself and reword what I say over and over again. I'm not exaggerating. Of course I have nothing against these people doing these jobs, it is not unreasonable though to want to understand them and they, me.

Bring back Received Pronunciation! Unintelligible, regional accents abound everywhere now.

Accents aside I think there is a technological factor here too - we don't speak face to face as often as we used to, that practiced skill of clear oral communication is getting rarer, apparently even in professional settings. When someone is mumbling in my general direction or over the phone, I sometimes wonder if it would be easier, and preferred on their part just to text or email me or perhaps use some form of semaphore. Blame for this failure of communication is almost always apportioned to those who actually speak in a proper fashion, as if the failure to decipher the oral equivalent of txt speek was theirs.

It's not down to the illiterate man to achieve functional literacy, but to you, as a literate man, to oblige him by agreeing to remove apostrophes from street signs. While we're at it, we should also remove all the punctuation from Shakespeare, because the onus is of course on him, too, to make himself intelligible.

I tried too hard to enunciate properly on the phone, so I'd get mistaken for a phone message!

Warning for language.


(off topic)
At your age you might have missed out on Monkey Dust (2003-5). It was a brutal, hilarious, if sometimes crass takedown of the Blair era. BBC would never greenlight it today.


Minor apologies to American foreign policy and Hollywood, but you know you deserve it.

Thanks for being well-bred enough to appreciate that profanity might offend. People are too lax on this front.

I'm off to bed shortly, but I look forward to checking out the videos soon.

I don’t think that having a thick accent means that one is illiterate. I appreciate the diversity that various dialects and accents bring to the table. People often feel a connection to the regionalisms they grew up with. It makes them feel at home.

It can be difficult to understand people over the phone, though. Some of that is due to problems on my end. I often struggle on the phone.

I watched all the clips above, and wondered what serious point was being made. When you mentioned profanity, I assumed you meant once or twice; the clips turned out to be nothing but profanity and crass puerility. Maybe the BBC will recommission the show after all.

A much better, more refined take on the above issues was given by Bremner, Bird and Fortune, from around the same time. I used to watch it with my father:

Iraq:


The 2008 financial crisis:


Anthony Blair:


No posturing, no profanity, no gratuitous offensiveness - just good, old fashioned satirical comedy and all the more amusing and effective for it. In an age of bad taste and short attention spans, no wonder it hasn't been recommissioned.

I genuinely love different accents. Makes it feel exciting as if you are travelling the world without leaving your desk chair.

As an American, and ignoring all your colloquialisms and idioms, all Brits are unintelligible. Subtitles are a must.

There are people within Britain that dont understand other British people. My family are from Cornwall and my wife had no idea at all what my granddad was saying!

I also have a hard time understanding thick accents. I believe this is abnormal issue here because people take offense. I have seen other people interact with them and they seemed to have no trouble at all. People just need to say their words clearly and talk slowly to me and I might not have a problem. It's worse over the phone if they are talking fast.

There are people out there that do have accents and I have no issues understanding them because they say their words clearly. It's just people who have a hard time speaking English I have troubles with.

I mentioned this in my post. To me, Polish immigrants - say - are more intelligible than many Mancunians and Liverpudlians.

I will admit, I notice that in the US we have a wide range of dialects and accents - not just regional but cultural, and in the UK I don't hear that. Race, gender, region, it's a bit like everyone's got a gun to each other's head like 'If you can't nail the accent you're not human'.

I think one of my more interesting experiences might have been auditing accounts payable for someone can calling a taconite retailer, can't remember if it was a division of Huntsman Tioxide (that sounds close if not 100%), but they had their billing in India and I remember the guy getting on the phone with a very thick English accent, which was masking relatively broken English, and it was easier to understand him once he realized that I was American and dropped the forced English accent.

Don't get me wrong, I think the English accent is beautiful and it should be maintained, but I do see where the cultural strong-arming can make things less practical, ie. like forcing someone who can barely speak English to also do so with perfect regional pronunciation. In that case you're lucky enough to be able to understand what they're saying to begin with.

call centers operate from low wage countries,
all kinds of telephonic assistances too,
eg a big union was critized for having its telephone assistances also moved over