Spoken English: The Backbone of the BPO industry

Picture this – A customer service executive in an Indian BPO works in a business process that requires investigating customervproblems related to retail banking. The investigation involves written and verbal correspondence with overseas customers, who are native speakers of the English language, in order to give updates, assurances, and eventually a resolution to their problems. Customers who contact the parent company of the BPO tend to be upset and expect a speedy resolution of their query. Calling a customer is always a faster option to wrap up a query, as compared to writing a business letter. Calling also saves the customer the suspense of knowing whether they’re receiving a resolution, besides the opportunity for the customer service executive to offer real-time verbal assurances about quality. However, despite the obvious desirable outcomes of a telephonic interaction with a customer, this employee rarely picks up the phone to talk to customers. His unwillingness to talk to a customer is rooted in his limited language and communication skills. Nevertheless, this limitation remains under the management’s radar with no grave concerns raised about his performance
since this person is able to function in his role reasonably well by adhering to business procedures and policies, including religiously writing largely scripted business letters to customers! Customers who do not receive calls from this person have a service experience which is different from what they desire. The ultimate consequence for the company is loss of business as some of these customers are not completely convinced of assured service standards and hence decide to do business with the company’s competitors.

The above vignette highlights an important aspect of employment in a BPO business – there are often ingenious ways to get around personal limitations in communication skills when interfacing with customers who are native speakers of the English language. Even as employees manage to perform as per the company’s expectations, they might not be doing what is best for the business – talking to customers. The stark and simple fact about the BPO industry is that business process outsourcing tends to take place from English-speaking countries to those where English is not the first language. This entails that a BPO employee who is required to invest a significant amount of time and effort in speaking to customers, actually has adequate facility with the English language. While language training programs and online self-learning modules can help build telephone etiquettes and drive home the importance of standard parameters of communication skills such as avoiding fillers, varying one’s acknowledgement, appropriate greeting and closing lines etc, these methods cannot teach an employee spoken English language skills. Especially, the ability to understand and respond verbally to native speakers of the language is not something that can be taught in an induction program before an employee hits the floor. Let’s face it – although communication goes beyond language skills, the latter is still a core competency within communication that cannot be substituted justifiably!

With the multi-billion dollar Indian BPO industry being attacked in recent times by political rhetoric reflecting anti-outsourcing sentiments from the US as well as actual outsourcing bans as in the case of Ohio, there is a need to relook standards of spoken English language proficiency that BPOs in India are willing to accept for incoming recruits. This relook is pragmatic because customer satisfaction over the telephone is intrinsically linked to communication and language skills of the employee. A collective build up of dissatisfaction with customer service from non-English speaking countries will only serve to fuel further anti-outsourcing sentiment in the west. Adding to this urgency is rising competition from other hotspots for outsourcing such as the Philippines, China or countries in Latin America. In these countries, overall standards of English proficiency might be higher or improving rapidly due to factors such as more concerted governmental efforts to promote the English language and greater cultural familiarity with the west.
Traditional methods of assessing language competency by language trainers are cumbersome and are often fraught with subjective decisions. What progressive BPOs that rely on language and culture training programs need to understand is that the steady stream of hopefuls seeking BPO jobs should be screened in a standardized, efficient and reliable manner that reduces or even better, eliminates human involvement completely. Given the wide range of business processes within a company, each with varying ratios of non-voice to voice components, such a screening would also eliminate wrong matches between language capability and the business process requirement. The cost of a wrong match is not apparent right away or even in the long run, as in the case of the employee in the vignette. However, when more and more such individuals, who are skilled in other aspects and would be better suited to other responsibilities, find their way to speaking roles they are unwilling or incapable of performing, the end result for the BPO will be a disconnect with customer needs, eventually leading to loss of brand reputation and business.

Clearly, the Indian BPO industry needs to take major strides in the direction of upgrading the pool of proficient English-language speakers in order to stay ahead of the race and achieve their business goals for their parent companies in the west.

“Yes Men” in Organizations

This write-up has germinated from our contribution towards a story done by Times Ascent on “Yes Men in organizations”. “Yes- Men” employees are described as individuals who would be ready to take on as many tasks as possible. They are typically affable, willing to take on challenges and happy to deal with whatever demands they make. They agree to help their fellow employees just as easily and accepting work that does not fall within their job description. While they may seem like the perfect employees, are they really perfect?

Well, before we answer this question, it is vital to understand the characteristic traits of such individuals that make them stand apart from their colleagues and how they can be identified. Broadly these individuals seem like possessing a perfect blend of task-oriented and relationship orientation. Such individuals are not impervious to their image and status and may seek situations that enhance their image. We also call them “Superman” profiles since they are hardly discouraged not to take any initiative and responsibility, however one may not make the same judgement about the execution. They are driven by this desire to be at the centrefold of activities and which impels them to accept each and every work opportunity in a hope to receive recognition. They devote themselves to several tasks or missions simultaneously and get entangled in situation which doesn’t require their involvement and time – and this might work against them and their team morale. Also taking more than what you can, sometimes result in missing deadlines in projects requiring critical involvement. However these set of people can be great assets if one knows how to utilise their strengths. Such employees should be identified in terms of their default style of working i.e. the underlying traits and their motivations or values. SOSIE is a comprehensive work based personality tool that can be used for this purpose. SOSIE is a French word translating as a “perfect resemblance to another”. SOSIE is more than a simple personality assessment. It is an online questionnaire measuring personality traits, interpersonal values and personal values within one instrument which enables in determining candidate’s performance at workplace. It identifies a person’s value system to reliably predict their motivations, behaviour and adaptation to a role and/ or organizational culture.

So, how perfect are these individuals for any organization? Depends on how the organisations are utilising their strengths at the same time being fully aware of their capabilities. Any team should have a mix composition of people. Team members are like fruits in a basket that hold together but bring in a different flavour to the task at hand. Whether having Yes Men in organizations or not is contingent on the growth stage and the corresponding culture of that organization. For instance, such employees can be advantageous for small sized or start-up organisations. In such organisations, people need to be more proactive and enterprising in getting things done and need to look beyond their prescribed KRAs. They should be comfortable with multi-tasking and ambiguity. However, in large and organised set up where competencies, roles and responsibilities are fully defined across levels – it’s necessary to contain such people and make them focus on task relevant to their area of expertise in order to avoid any disharmony within team. In some situations, these people can be a great contingent resource.

However, their leadership potential seems to be in question. As leaders, one has to steer the team by empowering others and not by sitting on the rear seat and driving on its own. For such people to be future leaders, they need to be tolerant and trusting of others and foster a culture of coaching and mentoring rather than doing everything on their own and not delegating. They have to be catalysts that enjoy drawing out the best in others. Such employees should leverage on their strengths of being relationship-oriented and take on a more leading and strategizing activities and break their comfort zone of always producing the work. As leaders one is responsible for one’s own action and developing the team. So as long as they learn to show team members how things get done and in the process, mentor and coach people and help develop their skills – they can be great leaders. If this is not done, there are grave risks associated with such people where employees and team members may shrug of the responsibilities and ownership.

Keeping this mind, how should organisations utilise such employees? The best way to optimize the enthusiasm of “yes-men” employees is to channelize their energies in developing, training people and setting up best practices while showing the way rather than doing others job. Since connecting with people comes naturally to them, they can be great buddies who can help assist their team members and create a healthy and conducive team culture of support and success through partnership. This will have a direct implication on everyone’s productivity.