Dissertation proposal

Here's my preliminary dissertation proposal. It was accepted as a preliminary proposal, but with the caveat that it would require more work to be my final dissertation proposal to be filed with the college.

Cultural Factors that Influence Intercultural Telephone Calls:
An Analysis of Indian Call Centers

In the customer service blog created by a large computer seller (referred to as Byron Computers in this document) to improve customer service, one customer pleads

Before reading this blog and finding out that you are working on the problem, I had decided on AB[B]-- anything but -- this despite the fact that all of your products have given me excellent service. I just couldn't face the prospect of dealing with technical help. I find the outsourcing unbearable. The people are nice enough, and I think that they are trying hard. However, when I can't understand them and they seem to be reading from some script that dictates that they say my name repeatedly while trying to placate me with politeness (ordinarily something I treasure), I want to pull my hair out-- slowly, one by one.... Make me want to buy another [Byron], please! (Weinberger 2006).

Another customer asks more succinctly, “Does this mean you’ll be moving your call centers back to a native-English speaking country?” (Waters 2006). The general tone of the blog intended to deal with customer support is rife with complaints about Indian call center workers. And these customers aren’t the only ones that have noticed the Indian call centers. Numerous industry publications have identified the frustration many consumers have with Indian call centers (Bailor 2005), (Sandberg 2007), (Fleischer 2005), (Ali 2006). Clearly Byron hasn’t been entirely successful at outsourcing their support operations to India.

Byron hires primarily well-educated, native or fluent English speakers (India has 40 million native English speakers, and more English fluent English speakers than the U.S. (Natarajan and Pandit 2008).) and trains them on both their products and American accents, yet customers still complain that they can’t understand call center workers. Although undoubtedly difficulties understanding accents and vocabulary may create communication problems, the extent of communication problems that occurs cannot be explained by accents and vocabulary issues alone (Forey and Lockwood 2007), (Kim 1999,) (Warren 2004). Rather, cultural differences interfere with the communication between these call center workers and their customers to the degree that the consumers believe that they are speaking with non-native English speakers. Furthermore, these communication difficulties have created a consumer bias so that some consumers believe that their communication with the call center is unsatisfactory before it even begins, if the call center worker has a foreign accent. Both Ali (2006) and Sandberg (2007) describe call center situations in which consumers insisted on speaking with Americans. Clearly, the cultural differences between Indian call center workers and the U.S. customers they serve are compromising call center workers’ ability to provide the technical information that consumers need. This situation raises the question: what are the cultural differences that interfere with telephone communication between Indian call center workers and their U.S. clients?


Call Centers and Technical Communication

At first glance, call centers don’t fit traditional definitions of technical communication. One associates technical communication with broadcast forms of media. In the past, technical communication dealt primarily with print media, but since the Internet became public, technical communication has expanded to electronic media, because electronic media provides a myriad of advantages for both consumers and manufacturers. For example, electronic media allows manufacturers to update documentation during a product’s life cycle, not between product iterations, while saving overhead costs associated with shipping and printing. For consumers, electronic media allows them to read documentation before they purchase the product and to access lost documentation as well as receive updates to documentation. Electronic documentation provides advantages for both consumers and manufacturers.

Consequently, the media for technical communication shifted from print to electronic media, and technical communicators shifted with it. Similarly technical communication is shifting to synchronous, individualized forms of communication. While real-time synchronous technologies such as the telephone allow manufacturers to offer consumers both immediate assistance as well as assistance tailored to their individual need, in the past, relying heavily on synchronous media to deliver technical information to their consumers was cost prohibitive both because synchronous technology like telephones were too expensive to use, and because labor costs were too high. Consumers were frequently required to pay a fee for such synchronous help or, at least, were required to wait in long telephone queues. As the operations costs of technologies such as the telephone declined and new technologies like instant message arose, they allowed both access for consumers as well as labor arbitrage to operate them. These technologies have become both more ubiquitous but more complicated, and the need for synchronous technical communication tailored to the individual need of the consumer increased. In other words, technological advances simultaneously allowed manufacturers to provide a superior level of service to their customers, while creating a need for this superior level of service. And just as technical communication expanded to include electronic as well as print media, it must also expand to include synchronous media as well.

And yet, while synchronous, the media of the call center call is not free from text. Call center workers are trained extensively using the texts developed by technical communicators. Furthermore, these workers rely on scripts and decision trees also written by technical communicators. Finally much of their job as call center workers is reading the electronic documentation to consumers. So, in part, an analysis of call center calls is really an examination of how the same information a consumer can find in the electronic formerly print documentation is reframed and repackaged in a different media—a task that Johnson-Eilola (2004) identifies as the core of technical communication .

Technical communicators have traditionally been advocates for the audience/consumer during the production and delivery of products and services. In fact, technical communicators are frequently the only advocates for the audience/consumer. In the twenty first century, producers use media and staff to communicate with their customers in ways not imagined by technical communicators at the beginning of technical-communication professionalization at the beginning of the twentieth century. When early engineers began writing documentation to assist the consumers of their products, print was the most efficient way to communication with consumers (Kynell 1999). Now a variety of print and electronic, synchronous and asynchronous media is available to the twenty-first century technical communicator. Technical communicators have a variety of technology they may use to convey information to consumers and decisions about the best media to use are rhetorical and practical. To continue the traditional role of technical communicators as consumer advocates in the global and technologically-enriched twenty first century, technical communicators must expand their field of inquiry to include all communication between consumers and providers regardless of media, format, culture, or geography. While this research will certainly benefit companies that seek to provide services at lower cost by international outsourcing, also known as offshoring, its primary goal is to continue the role of technical communicator as consumer advocate in the twenty first century.

Pitfalls for Call Center Communication

So, technical communicators should understand that communication processes they had managed via print in the twentieth century are not moving to just electronic media, but real-time media as well. And while the media and format have changed, the lessons technical communicators have learned about communicating with consumers should still apply to these new formats and media. A cursory examination of literature in technical communication reveals that first, communication tends to break down when trying to communicate across fields. Secondly communication fails when trying to convey bad news (Winsor 1988, Sauer 2003, Herndl et.al. 1991).

If a technician tells a consumer that the solution to fixing his or her laptop or desktop is to reformat the hard drive, a time consuming and difficult process that usually results in the loss of some data, he or she is not going to be inclined to reject such advice and be dissatisfied with the results of their technical support call.

These lessons serve to illustrate that communication failures generally do not come from routine failures of grammar and syntax. Rather communication failures result from the complex nature of communication that relies not only on the words themselves but the context that those words reside in.

Cultural Context

And all words reside in their cultural context. In fact, some researchers would say that the words are part of the blocks that build the culture. Tomlinson (1999) defines culture essentially as communication i.e the signs and symbols we use to communicate. Hofstede (1991) explains that culture is the internal programming—the software if you will—that we use to interpret the world around us. Geertz (1973) has a more complex and ultimately I believe a more useful definition of culture. He explains culture is not language, signs, symbols, habits, practices, and ritual, but rather the matrix of meaning we build around such things. For example, to imply that mere knowledge of the name of the professional football team that plays in Dallas, TX is to understand the culture of people living in Dallas is to reduce culture meaninglessly to its individual pieces. It’s to equate dots of paint on canvas to the Mona Lisa.

The society we live in trains us to both create and interpret the meanings of these cultural signs. In his book Discipline and Punish Foucault (1977) discusses the ways in which institutions apply almost covert pressure to conform by watching and correcting. Society’s panoptic eye functions to apply subtle pressure to its members to adopt particular communication expectations and strategies. Consequently, these cultural differences create conflicting communication methods that make intercultural communication difficult (Sriussapadorn 2006) (Walker 2003) (Ulijn and Campbell 2001).


Yet many Indian call centers have focused on the trivialities that Geertz dismisses as the signs to interpret not the interpretation itself. A quick walk down the cube farm in an Indian call center reveals long lists of the professional sports teams in all the major cities in the United States. Clearly, companies understand that cultural factors are inhibiting communication, but they don’t know how to train their workers to account for these cultural factors. And, if culture is understanding everything from football to food, it seems unlikely that Byron Computers or any other company can successfully fill in the culture gaps. However, Indian call center workers and the consumers they serve do have a common culture—that of Byron Computers and the telephone, and that’s the common culture that call center workers can develop and trade on to bridge the communication culture gap.


Methodology

Until recently most technical communicators relied upon the work of Hall (1976) and Hofstede (1991) to explain the intercultural dissonance between call center staff and their intercultural clients. First, I’d like to briefly explain their systems, why they no longer apply to many technical communication texts, and how we might find new methodologies to improve intercultural technical communication. In the past, most technical communication has been via broadcast media initially print and now electronic media. However, the improvement of broadband technologies and globalization have created opportunities for companies to provide more targeted, frequently individualized, often real-time synchronous modes for technical communication. Unfortunately, such targeted communications are more difficult because participants may not have the characteristics of the larger cultural group they belong to and communicators using many of these new, or at least improved, broadband technologies don’t have the benefit of visual feedback and, in e-mail and IM, not even aural feedback. So, these new technologies have allowed manufacturers to provide consumers with technical information in more personalized and timely methods, but these methods require them to understand the consumers they serve. This understanding becomes even more difficult when provider and consumer are from different cultures.

In his book, Beyond Culture, Hall (1976) explains his theory of high context and low context communication. As the name implies, high context communication relies on the context of the conversation—the previous relationship of the speakers, shared knowledge etc.--to derive meaning. Countries typically associated with high context communication styles are China, Japan, and India. However, if the wife and the husband live in a low context country such as the United States, the wife might find that she will have better luck achieving her desires if she overtly describes what she would like. Using this model, low context countries like the U.S., Australia, and Germany may have difficulties communicating with high-context countries like India, China, and Japan, but people from low context countries find it easier to communicate with people from other low context countries and vice versa.

In Software of the Mind, Hofstede (1991) also describes several factors that might interfere with communication. For example, he defines collectivist and individualist countries. In collectivist countries—most countries—members of a group—familial or corporate—strive to have the group succeed and to maintain harmony within the group. Individualist countries value the achievements of the individual and conflict isn’t exactly valued, but is acceptable if it is perceived as being honest and goal-oriented. Consequently, communication with collectivist countries can be difficult if one isn’t perceived as being a member of the group, while membership in an exclusionary group can even have negative connotations in an individualist society; other factors such as mutual benefit etc. are generally inducements for communication in individualist countries. However, once one has gained membership into the group, one tends to continue to belong to the group regardless of outside circumstances. In individualist societies, ones relationship with others can frequently depend on the continuation of mutually beneficial circumstances.

While the theories of Hall and Hofstede shed light on intercultural communication in the aggregate—appropriate for broadcast media—they do not apply in more specialized circumstances. Hofstede (1991) cautions against making levels of analysis mistakes by assuming that individuals within a country have the characteristics of that country. Within a country many people may deviate from the norm. It’s quite possible to encounter an individualist within a collectivist society and vice versa. Furthermore, collectivist groups might exist within an individualist society such as the Mafia within the United States. However, as a group, people tend to act according to the characteristics of their country and the institutions within that country tend to support those characteristics.

Using these factors to predict and analyze intercultural communication can be quite seductive because they are well-developed theories that are easy to apply. When planning for a particular intercultural encounter, one can simply look up the countries involved and plan accordingly. Likewise it’s easy to use these factors as a kind of terministic screen to explain communication behaviors between cultures. However, recent technical communication researchers have pointed to problems with these models. Hunsinger (2006) claims that heuristic approaches like Hall’s and Hofstede’s presuppose that culture is a universal thing that grounds cultural identity. Consequently, the “construction and mobilization of cultural identity during discursive exchange tends to be neglected” (37). Hunsinger (2006) offers political, economic, and historical factors as possible influences on communication. Although he alludes to ways in which these extracultural factors might influence communication, he doesn’t provide concrete examples. Rather he explains how the experiences of one expatriate, Chinese acquaintance of his is influenced by different cultural characteristics that he refers to as scapes as in technoscapes, mediascapes etc.

However, I can imagine a more applicable situation in which this view of intercultural communication might inform an internationally outsourced call center function. For example, the United States might bring pressure to bear on India to give up their claim to Kashmir in exchange for Pakistan’s cooperation in the “global war on terror.” Such an occurrence might not predispose Indians kindly towards Americans in telephone exchanges. In his article Hunsinger (2006) is not denying Hofstede’s and Hall’s analysis of culture, but rather pointing out how other factors may and probably will confound communication, because cultural identity is an ongoing and dynamic discursive act. If, as Hunsinger has asserted, culture is separate from cultural identity and, furthermore, constructed during the communication act, how do researchers identify the factors that interfere with cross-cultural communication in any meaningful, generalizable way? Rather than applying a different set of cultural factors to consider when examining cross-cultural interactions, I believe the solution resides in developing techniques for examining typical intercultural situations.

In her dissertation, Hannah Sun (2004) offers both a critique of these theorists and research to illustrate and prove her claim. She examined the use of text messaging among U.S. and Chinese young adults. She demonstrated how the use of this technology deviates from the behavior that would be predicted by Hofstede as well as Honold’s (1999) research. Because China is a collectivist country, Chinese young adults should learn to use new technology by talking to their friends etc. However, she discovered that this new generation of Chinese technology users preferred to use documentation in part because they were unwilling to wait for an opportunity to talk to their friends about the technology. They wanted to use it immediately. Similarly she noted that they tended to use Pinyin—a version of Chinese translated into a western alphabet—to use text messaging rather than the ideograph software available in part because it was difficult to learn. She postulated that subgroups deviated significantly from the norms established by Hall and Hofstede and that analysis of these subgroups was necessary to inform technical communication.

Additionally Sriussapadorn (2006) also rejects the heuristic analysis of intercultural communication and claims that data-driven studies between particular subgroups in particular contexts are the only way to describe, understand, and ultimately improve such exchanges.

Sun (2004) and Sriussapadorn (2006) both suggest methods for understanding intercultural communication quite differently than Hunsinger (2006). Hunsinger (2006), although I’m sure he would disagree, suggests replacing the heuristics of Hall, Hofstede, and others with more transient and immediately present factors in the lives of communicators. Communicators use these factors to construct their discursive cultural identity and that by understanding these factors that contribute to transient and constructed cultural identities we can elucidate communication difficulties that might arise during intercultural communication. Hannah Sun’s research suggests and Sriussapadorn’s research states that research should inform an evidence-based approach to intercultural technical communication that investigates a particular communication exchange between subgroups and identifies intercultural communication difficulties in a particular context. While the work of Hunsinger (2006), Sun (2004), and Sriussapadorn (2006) all critique the heuristics of the past and suggest methodologies for describing intercultural communication in the future, none of them suggest research methodologies likely to yield the predictive models that could result in better training and ultimately communication for intercultural call centers.

However, in their 2007 article about an intercultural call center in the Phillipines that serviced the insurance industry, Forey and Lockwood (2007) relied on a systemic functional linguistic approach to analyze calls. By focusing on the generic nature of calls, they were able to classify types of miscommunication that allowed them to develop training for call center workers. They did this by both identifying the stages of call center calls as well as identifying characteristics of register that created problems. They broke these problems into phonological/lexical choices, clause—interpersonal choices, and discourse choices.

Based on their research, I propose to use systemic functional linguistics to analyze call center calls as well, because they’ve identified two culturally dependent factors, register and genre, that create meaning during the call center telephone call. Furthermore, they’ve developed vocabulary and systems to analyze register and genre. Genre is a staged-goal oriented social process (Martin 2000, 161) (Painter 2000, 167). Register accounts for the context of a conversation and is divided into field (involving the interaction of people with their world), mode (the medium of communication), and tenor. Martin contends that, “You have to use enough signals of register and genre to ensure that your listener can see where you are coming from. Otherwise, you will simply not be fully understood” (Martin 2001, 162). Genre and register are two of the cultural factors that interfere with intercultural communication. By recognizing the ways in which people from a particular culture manipulate register and genre to build meaning, we can train others to recognize genre and register in order to completely understand people from those cultures, as well as, communicate successfully with them.

So, for my study, I propose analyzing intercultural, call center calls just as Forey and Lockwood (2007) did. Unlike Forey and Lockwood, I’ll analyze information technology calls to Indian call centers not insurance calls to call centers in the Philippines and try to describe which uses of genre and register are successful and unsuccessful. I’ll use characteristics of success as defined by Byron Computers such as customer satisfaction, time, repeated calls on the same issue, and amount of products shipped out.

Before analyzing the calls, I propose analyzing two other types of communication that elucidate the call center call. First, I would like to analyze the customer service blogs from Byron Corporation in an effort to understand the problems as perceived by Byron’s customers. To analyze these blogs, I’ll use discourse analysis and categorize the types of complaints that customers have i.e. complaints about adherence to a script, complaints about accent etc. I’ll probably quantify such complaints even though the self-selection of the blog participants would render any quantitative analysis suspect. (It’s possible I lack the imagination to see how quantitative analysis could apply in this situation.)

After analyzing the blogs, I’ll analyze training materials for Indian call center workers to begin to understand why call center workers might respond to customers as they do. Are they following their training, or spontaneously responding to the caller? Just as with the blogs, I’ll use discourse analysis to categorize items of interest. Interesting items within training will be texts specifically identified in the blogs as offensive such as scripts. For items such as scripts or decisions trees, I will analyze them to determine if they attempt to train call center workers to use rhetorical techniques to build ethos and to identify those rhetorical techniques. I also plan to analyze the entirety of both training sets to establish the degree of overlap.

Finally, I’ll analyze the call center telephone calls (from now on referred to as just calls) using systemic functional linguistics. First I’ll perform a pilot in which I’ll transcribe 3-5 calls looking at both genre and register. For genre, I’ll establish the stages of the call center call genre and what the expectations within the genre and then I’ll compare that analysis to the Indian call center calls. For register, I’ll look at grammar, word choice, and discourse style. Grammar will consider things like verb tense. Do callers use present tense or progressive present tense? For example, “I understand you.” vs. “I am understanding you.” Additionally I’ll consider appropriate word choice such as I am very sorry to hear about your husband’s death instead of I apologize for the death of your husband. Finally I’ll consider discourse styles. Do call center workers rearticulate the issue from the caller in a more circular discourse style, or do they state a solution or at least the next step in the procedure as quickly as possible? I’ll use the pilot to articulate these categories more clearly and then analyze an additional twenty calls from each call center. Although 20 calls may appear to be a small data set, Forey and Lockwood (2007) analyzed only 13 calls in their data set, so I believe a small pilot plus an additional 50 calls should be sufficient to identify some problems. Obviously, a larger data set would be desirable, but the time required to transcribe and analyze the calls makes a larger data set untenable.

For the time being, I imagine the organization of my dissertation to be information driven i.e. I’ll organize the dissertation by gathering together similar types of information. However, I realize that as the dissertation develops such an arrangement might not be the most beneficial. Currently I envision the outline of my dissertation as follows:
Chapter 1 Introduction: background, statement of problem and research question, brief overview of methodology and dissertation.
Chapter 2 Literature review
Chapter 3 Methodology: description of how I will apply the methodology as well as an argument for why the methods I’ve chosen are reliable and valid
Chapter 4 Blog analysis: description of the how I collected data from the blogs, the results, and an analysis of the data
Chapter 5 Training material analysis: a description of how I collected data from the training materials, what the data was, and an analysis of the data
Chapter 6 Indian Call Center Calls: a description of how I analyzed the calls, the data this analysis rendered, an analysis of the data, and a description of the parameters of a successful call.
Chapter 7: Conclusion: a discussion of my findings


Tentative schedule

August 2008 Take qualifying exams
Fall 2008 Collect data
Spring 2009 Analyze data and collect any additional data
Summer 2009 Draft dissertation
Fall 2009 Revise dissertation
Spring 2010 Defend dissertation
May 2010 Graduate!!!!!

I’ll revisit and possibly revise this schedule on June 30, 2008.

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