Latest Proposal /First Chapter

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

Introduction

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 Byron-- 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! (Steinberger 2006).

Another customer asks more succinctly, “Does this mean you’ll be moving your call centers back to a native-English speaking country?” (Seas 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 who 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.

And the source of customer dissatisfaction isn’t entirely clear. Like most complicated problems, the source of customer dissatisfaction with Indian Call Centers is multifaceted. Byron hires primarily well-educated, native or fluent English speakers (India has 40 million native English speakers, and more 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 occur cannot be explained by accents and vocabulary issues alone (Forey and Lockwood 2007), (Kim 1999,) (Warren 2004). Furthermore, some customers may resent working with someone from another country when their friends and neighbors in the U.S. are jobless or harbor some other prejudice, but these issues do not explain the extent of customer dissatisfaction either. Rather, some other issue creates the impression that customers can’t understand call center workers and that they aren’t getting their needs met. Additionally, these issues affect all U.S. customers, while many customers might not be affected by accents or resentment. Furthermore, these other issues 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. In an interview with Ryan (2009) (all proper names are pseudonyms), an Indian Call Center manager, he claimed that his team encountered an average of one person per shift who refused to work with an Indian call center. Even though these workers explained that they could not forward the customer to a U.S. help desk, but only return them to the call center queue, these customers refused to work with them. Byron has countered this issue by selling U.S. only service contracts for a premium, and some customers are willing to pay that premium. However, Byron’s own internal metrics demonstrate that it may not be money well spent. According to Ryan, customer surveys indicate that while customers rank overall customer experience for U.S. call centers higher than their Indian counter parts, they perceive that their technical problem is dealt with more accurately when working with Indian call centers. In other words, they rank the overall experience worse, despite perceiving that they get their problem corrected more often. And it’s not surprising that Indian call centers handle technical issues as well as if not better than their U.S. counterparts. They receive identical technical training plus additional “communication training” and use the same decision trees and documentation as their U.S. counterparts. Furthermore, they are more likely, although not required, to have a degree beyond a secondary degree. Additionally, they have greater access to both a technical manager and an escalation manager, because each call center group of 20 people in India has access to such people while their U.S. counterparts work in groups of 32 and must share such personnel. Ostensibly customers telephone call centers to correct a problem, and everything indicates that Indian call centers do that well.

Nonetheless, customers are dissatisfied with Indian call centers. Because Indian call centers solve technical problems as well as if not better than their U.S. counterparts, the issue must be with the process of the transaction, not the outcome of the transaction. And because call center transactions occur on the telephone, the dissatisfaction must be with the oral communication. U.S. customers are dissatisfied by talking with Indian Call Center representatives, so they must perceive some kind of difficulty with oral communication.

Research by (Forey and Lockwood 2007), (Kim 1999,) (Warren 2004) indicated that cultural linguistic issues complicate communication between the U.S. and India. Cultural and linguistic issues that complicate the call center transaction include but are not limited to communication practices such as the meaningful pause, sarcasm, humor, tone, and politeness. My research attempts to unravel one small part of this complicated problem. In other words what cultural and linguistic issues complicate communication between Indian call center workers and their U.S. clients?




Call Centers and Technical Communication

At first glance, transactions at call centers don’t fit traditional definitions of technical communication, because technical communication has been primarily associated with broadcast media. However, technical communication hasn’t eschewed other forms of communication, because they aren’t appropriate forms of communication, but rather technical limitations and expense dictated the use of broadcast media. Good technical communicators have always tried to use the most effective media to communicate and have always been quick to employ new technology when it clearly offered advantages. Historical precedent doesn’t dictate media for technical communication; expense and effectiveness do. Now that technological improvements have increased the media options for technical communication, call centers are the most effective means for conveying technical communication in particular circumstances. Call centers offer a rich, synchronous environment that provides a more effective medium for the rapidly changing variety of products purchased by users with technical skills that vary greatly.

This shift from broadcast media to call centers is a logical communication shift in an age of secondary orality. Secondary orality as defined by Walter Ong (1982) describes a stage of cultural development in which a society returns to a reliance on oral communication, but still relies on written communication to shore up oral communication. An example might be call centers which operate using oral communication informed by a raft of printed documentation, scripts, and decision trees. Historically, this stage represents a shift from a society that values printed text above oral communication to one that at least finds some appeal in oral communication even while still valuing written text. So while people may enjoy and respond to video, podcasts, call centers etc. they still have a belief in the value of text. Call centers are an ideal manifestation of secondary orality because call center representatives communicate orally, but their communications are informed by texts such as decision trees, scripts, and documentation. This new method of communication still relies on the old content; it’s just conveyed in new ways (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Spinuzzi 2003.) So, the delivery method and not the content are the appropriate subject of study.

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. To continue the traditional role of 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.


Shift from Print to Electronic
Technical communicators have always sought the most effective media that technology and expense have allowed. When the Internet became public, technical communication quickly 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 technical communicators shifted from print to electronic documentation, because it was the most effective format for the rhetorical situation.


Media Isn’t Determined by Historical Precedent, but Audience Need
Technical communication made the transition easily from print to electronic media, because technical information isn’t intrinsically tied to particular media. The media itself does not determine what constitutes technical communication; the message that technical communicators wish to convey does. More specifically, the rhetorical situation including audience, purpose, and access determine media. Rude (2004) made this case in her examination of the delivery of public policy reports. She stated that “The message cannot remain bound by the document. If one document is limited in persuading audiences to act, another document, another genre, another medium, another emphasis, other settings, other collaborators may be enlisted to help reach the goal” (p. 286.) Although Rude is not discussing documentation, but civic engagement through public policy reports, her analysis could apply to any technical communication intended to benefit and not manipulate the public. If it’s acceptable for public policy makers to persuade the public to accept and follow guidelines using a variety of documents and public hearings over time, then surely it’s acceptable for computer manufacturers to communicate the proper use of their products via call centers as well as print and CDs shipped with the product. Furthermore, if all of these media constitute technical communication, then they are also all an appropriate subject for study by technical communicators. Just as the policy makers Rude studied used a variety of documents and media over time to achieve their goal, computer manufacturers use a variety of media over time to achieve their goal--a product that consumers are happy with.

Consumers Prefer a Synchronous, Media-Rich Environment
When the Internet became readily available, companies were quick to shift their technical communication to an electronic environment in an effort to produce better products. Similarly technical communication is shifting to synchronous, individualized forms of communication such as a person-to-person telephone call as technologies allow. In 1992 Yates and Orlikowski pointed out that audiences prefer communication that is more immediate and specific to their needs. While real-time synchronous technologies such as the telephone have allowed manufacturers to offer consumers both immediate assistance as well as assistance tailored to their individual need, relying heavily on synchronous media to deliver technical information to their consumers was previously 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.


Richer Media Became Less Expensive and More Necessary
As the operations costs of technologies such as long-distance telephone calls declined and new technologies like instant messaging arose, these technologies allowed both access for consumers as well as labor arbitrage to operate the technology at a much lower cost. They also allowed technology manufacturers to rely on labor arbitrage to staff call centers. Until the advent of voice over internet protocol (VOIP) and satellite telephony, staffing a call center abroad would not have been a viable option because any cost savings from the labor arbitrage (hiring similar qualified workers for different hourly rates in foreign economies) would have been eroded by long distance service costs. Satellite telephony and VOIP have made the cost of telephony across long distances less expensive than local telephone service a decade ago. So, manufacturers can offer call center service that relies on foreign workers who are paid significantly less than their American counter parts. This labor arbitrage makes a reliance on call centers to provide technical support viable without increasing the cost of the product beyond the reach of the average consumer.

And this improved customer service ability came just in time for the consumer. For decades computers, especially networked computers, were the province of researchers, highly paid engineers and scientists, and very dedicated hobbyists. The Internet has changed that. Senior citizens chat with friends and share pictures of their grandchildren via instant messaging systems and six-year-olds write Santa via e-mail and their wish lists come complete with links to Amazon’s website. Obviously consumers aren’t using their old RCA’s to accomplish these tasks, but they may not have the technical expertise to trouble shoot their equipment even with the best documentation. The result of this rush to the Internet is that as consumer technologies became both more ubiquitous and more complicated, the need for synchronous technical communication tailored to the individual needs of the consumer increased. In other words, technological advances allowed manufacturers to provide a more desirable level of service to their customers; as less sophisticated consumers came to rely more heavily on more advanced technology this desirable level of service became a necessity. So, as technology has expanded media choices, technical communicators have responded by offering technical communication via an expanding array of media such as websites, CDs, chat sessions and telephone calls. And this expansion has caused consumers to expect richer media and to adapt documentation use in new ways.



Technical Support Calls Centers Have Always Dispensed Technical Communication
Call centers have always been appropriate sites of technical communication research. The increased use of call centers afforded by technological advances in telephony as well as the reliance on labor arbitrage has made their study more vital. In other words, when call centers were rarely used and operated by people from the same country if not the same region, they represented a small amount of very effective technical communication. Now that call centers have become a large part of the delivery system of technical communication as a result of unsophisticated users and the ability to offer the services without making products cost-prohibitive, and that technical communications frequently occurs between people from different continents, the call centers represent both a larger portion of technical communication as well as a portion that’s frequently poorly executed (Sandberg 2006 and Ali 2007). These factors require further study of intercultural call centers.

Even though it’s verbal communication, one must still classify this information that call centers dispense as technical communication. While the delivery of call center technical communication may be synchronous and verbal, the content of this technical communication still relies on text. Call center workers are trained extensively using texts developed by technical communicators. More specifically, these workers rely on scripts and decision trees. And much of the job of call center workers is reading 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 medium.


Pitfalls for Call Center Communication

While the media and format for technical communication has changed, the lessons technical communicators have learned about communicating with consumers should still apply to these new formats and media. Two lessons are especially pertinent: 1) communication tends to break down when trying to communicate across fields, and 2) communication fails when trying to convey bad news (Herndl et.al., 1991; Sauer, 2003; Winsor, 1988;).

For example, engineers don’t necessarily make good call center staffers even though they can diagnosis and repair issues more readily than technicians. They use language and even discourse patterns that consumers have difficulty following, and cannot communicate advice easily even when they use vocabulary that consumers understand. Furthermore, even technicians trained to talk to consumers can have difficulty relaying bad news. 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, the consumer is inclined to reject such advice and feel dissatisfied with the results of the technical support call. And while sometimes the issue is merely one of accents and vocabulary, the work of Forey and Lockwood 2007, Kim 1999, Warren 2004 would suggest that other issues are complicating the call center transaction in much the same way that people from different professions such as engineers and managers may have difficulty communicating even though they understand each others words.

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, which includes not only the words themselves but the context that those words reside in. As Winsor (1988) demonstrated in her work on the Challenger Tragedy or Sauer (2002) on mining accidents or Herndl et. al. (1991) and the Three Mile Island demonstrate, people didn’t act on the advice they received from experts because they didn’t understand it, but rather because they didn’t believe it or didn’t understand the implications or because it was delivered in the wrong tone or in an improper context. In each of these incidents one could make the case that the context i.e. managers making decisions instead of engineers or miners receiving information from engineers or an engineer talking to a manager caused the communication failure. While these are extreme examples of miscommunication, we generally only have such examples, because the loss of life and property in these accidents attract the investigative apparatus that revealed the communication failure (Herndl et. al. 1991 ) Generally, more mundane communication failures don’t attract the level of investigation that these extreme cases did. And I’m not trying to imply that the communication failures at call centers will be similar to these well-known examples, but merely to point out that communication failure is frequently well beyond the semantic level.

Cultural Context

And context, for words, is created by culture; all words reside in a cultural context. In fact, some researchers would say that words are part of the blocks that build the culture. Tomlinson (1999) maintains that culture is communication; he defines culture as 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 more useful definition of culture. He explains that culture is not language, signs, symbols, habits, practices, and ritual, but rather the matrix of meaning we build around such things. For example, the practice of religion, attending services, praying, abstaining from some behaviors while practicing others does not create a culture. Instead, culture is the meaning that attending services, praying, and abstaining from some behaviors and practicing others has for members of the culture both individually and collectively.

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. Halliday (1978) describes language acquisition in a similar manner. A child communicates under the watchful eye of his or her parents and teachers who correct sometimes overtly by telling the child what he or she should do or say but more often covertly by not responding appropriately. Thus society teaches a child complex communication strategies. When two people raised in different societies try to communicate, even though they may share a common language, vocabulary, and grammar, they probably won’t have learned the subtle communication strategies imbued by their parents and teachers. These differences apply even across regions in one country. In the southern United States speaking slowly is the sign of someone who is thoughtful and considers his or her ideas and thoughts carefully. Therefore, when someone from the south wants to make a point, he or she speaks more slowly. (Barbara Jordan’s speeches are a good example of this style of speaking. When she makes important points, her speech slows to a crawl, and she’ll even repeat the point.) On the other hand, northern speakers interpret slow speech as a sign of someone who is slow-witted. Generally, people from the northeast, in particular, just talk faster, and have spawned sayings in the south such as “fast-talking New Yorker.” These subtle differences complicate communication between people from different parts of the United States; Southerners may be suspicious of the fast-talking New Yorker, because he or she couldn’t possibly have considered what he or she is saying. Northerners may just think Southerners are stupid and disregard the speech of someone who is clearly mentally deficient. Neither group may be very effective at persuading the other. Such styles of communication are learned through culture’s panoptic eye.

So, if people from different regions of the United States have difficulty communicating effectively because of the effects of different cultural backgrounds, of course, people from different countries may have even greater conflicting communication methods that make intercultural communication difficult. Sriussapadorn (2006), Walker (2003) and Ulijn and Campbell(2001) conducted research in multinational corporations that illustrated the difficulties that people from different countries have communicating. Thatcher (1999) examined how the cultural, rhetorical traditions in the United States inhibited communication between members of the same multinational organization in Quito and the United States.

Furthermore, companies suspect that cultural differences contribute to communication problems. Yet many Indian call centers have focused on the trivialities that Geertz (1973, p. 13) dismisses as the signs to interpret not the interpretation itself. In other words, things like the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the religious practices you observe do not constitute culture, but rather the meaning that these actions hold for you create the culture. So simply informing someone of a cultural practice such as following a particular sports team without attempting to explain what, why, and how someone follows a sports team, is to provide no insight at all into that culture. Furthermore, one could argue that sports teams are a part of culture so removed from technical support that even if one were to explain and create a profound understanding of the meaning of fan practice to someone from another culture, it would not facilitate technical support. Yet, a quick walk through the office cubicles in an Indian call center reveals such trivia as long lists of the professional sports teams in all the major cities in the United States as well as weather patterns and food preferences. Clearly, companies understand that cultural factors are inhibiting communication, but they don’t know how to focus on the relevant cultural factors much less train their workers to overcome these cultural differences to communicate successfully and quickly. Furthermore, if the cultural understanding required to successfully staff a support center extends beyond the world of consumer electronics to 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: while workers of Byron Computers are on the telephone with the call center staffers. 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. I will 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.

Hall and Hofstede
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 (e.g., the previous relationship of the speakers, shared knowledge) to derive meaning. Countries typically associated with high context communication styles are China, Japan, and India. Low context countries are more likely to be western countries like the United States, Germany, and Australia. However, these communication styles are true only in the aggregate and not the specific. Many people who live in a low context country would prefer to communicate in a high context manner and vice versa. Consequently, these characterizations may not apply in specific instances.

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 are generally inducements for communication in individualist countries. However, once one has gained membership into the group in a collectivist society, one tends to continue to belong to the group regardless of outside circumstances. In individualist societies, one’s relationship with others can frequently depend on the continuation of mutually beneficial circumstances.

As I have noted, the improvement of broadband technologies and globalization have created opportunities for companies to provide more targeted, frequently individualized, 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 with greater specificity the consumers they serve. This understanding becomes even more difficult when provider and consumer are from different cultures. While Hall and Hofstede attempt to explain the root of the communication differences between people of different cultures, their theories may not apply in these individualized, synchronous communication media.

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 street gangs in cities of the United States.

Apart from these notable exceptions, Hall’s theories can have blatantly detrimental effects when applied poorly. For example, Forey and Lockwood’s (2007) study specifically mentioned sarcasm as a communicative strategy that Filipino call center workers didn’t understand. Hall’s concept of high/low context can exacerbate this problem. For example, Hall’s theories identify India as a high context culture in which communicators rely on the context of the situation to create meaning. Americans are low context and consequently overtly state their meaning. Consequently, when Indian call center workers taught to perceive Americans as low context ask a frustrated American if it would be ok to put him or her on hold, and the American replies, sarcastically, ”that would be great,” they are even more likely to take that particular remark at face value, because they’ve been taught that Americans say what they mean explicitly. The call center worker, understandably, concludes that the American customer on the line is more than happy to wait, and they may not get back to that customer as quickly as possible or take steps to avoid such actions in the future. They definitely do not refrain from putting that customer on hold. Sarcasm would appear to run counter to Hall’s theories that Americans are low context, since the true meaning of a sarcastic remark relies heavily on context, while traditionally high context cultures like Indian cultures and Filipino cultures do not use or understand sarcasm and therefore interpret such remarks literally in a low context fashion.

Even though Hall’s and Hofstede’s theories break down quickly when applied to individual exchanges, communicators have been loathe to abandon them. Using their theories to predict and analyze intercultural communication can be quite seductive because they are well-developed, well-tested, and easy to apply. When planning for a particular intercultural encounter, one can simply look up the countries involved and proceed accordingly. Likewise it’s easy to use these factors as a kind of terministic screen to explain communication behaviors between cultures rather than understanding in much the way one might validate one’s horoscope with random events. For example, one might interpret Chinese workers’ reliance on documentation for product assistance instead of their co-workers as a collectivist preference for relying on communal knowledge rather than a contradiction to these theories. Recent technical communication researchers such as Hunsinger, Sun, and Sriussapadorn have managed to resist the allure of these theories and 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.

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.

Empirical Approaches to Intercultural Communication
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. 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 (Chinese ideographs transliterated to the alphabet) in their text messages because the available ideograph software 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) 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. 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.

A Linguistic Approach to Intercultural Communication
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, interpersonal choices, and discourse choices.

Based on their research, I propose to use systemic functional linguistics to analyze call center calls. Systemic functional linguistics, popularized by M.A.K. Halliday as a method to improve instruction in English as a second language, examines how language interacts with context to create meaning. To do this, the linguistic school identified two culturally dependent factors, genre, that create meaning during the call center telephone call and developed vocabulary and systems to analyze register and genre. Genre is a staged, goal-oriented social process (Martin 2000, p. 161) (Painter 2000, p. 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, p. 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.

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) defines genre as a staged, goal-oriented social process. Carolyn Miller (1994) describes genre as a cultural artifact that reflexively shapes and is shaped by culture. While certainly one can learn the characteristics of a genre formally, in a classroom or from a book, many of the genres people use everyday are learned as a child interacting socially with people from a similar culture (Halliday 1978 and Miller 1984.) SFL seeks to characterize major genres, so that English as a second language learners may acquire them easily. They do this because genres, in and of themselves, convey meaning apart from the words they use. When someone from another culture who hasn’t had the benefit of learning a genre organically tries to communicate in a social situation that would normally require the proper use of a particular genre, he or she fails to communicate just as if he or she had used the wrong vocabulary or grammar.

Research Plan
To understand how genre affects Indian call center calls, I plan to model my study on the work of Forey and Lockwood (2007). To do this, I’ll transcribe the calls and divide them into successful calls that satisfy customers and calls with obvious communication breakdown. Successful calls are calls that are free from obvious miscommunication; in other words, I’ll examine calls in which callers do not repeat themselves, have to ask for clarification, respond in an obviously inappropriate manner, have long, unexplained pauses, or other indications of communication breakdown. I’ll examine calls in which the caller states and solves his or her problem and completes the call without obvious signs of miscommunication. If available, I might also analyze these calls according to customer satisfaction ratings. I’ll then diagram a subset of five successful calls that last longer than five minutes as Forey and Lockwood did, according to their stages. Without actual analysis, I can only speculate on the stages, but I expect they’ll be something like introduction, statement of issue, diagnosis, trouble shooting, and resolution. Using this subset of five successful calls, I’ll identify the language that signals a transition from one stage to the next, the time as well as the word count of a typical stage, and the language that signals a resolution of a particular stage. Once I’ve established the stages of a successful call center call, I’ll compare this range of acceptable genre to calls in which customers were not satisfied.. I’ll compare times and number of words as well as language transitioning from one stage to another. Such quantitative measures may not be relevant, but I won’t know until I measure them. It’s possible that skipping or truncating the statement of problem phase results in unsuccessful calls. Or, diagnostic segments that take more than five minutes are unlikely to be successful. This analysis should determine if these factors are important or not.

Register is another communication characteristic that SFL identifies to understand the relationship between language and context. As I stated before, register breaks down into field, mode, and tone. And it can uncover a lot about how people understand communication. For example, register can shed more light one of the most examined moments in failed communication, the negotiations at Morton Thiokol before the Challenger Tragedy that Dorothy Winsor (1988) elucidated so well. In her article, “Communication Failures Leading to the Challenger Accident,” Windsor recounts the key pieces of information engineers produced to alert managers to the problem with the shuttle’s O-rings and eventually to encourage them to scrub the launch. On the day before the launch the engineer in charge of the o-ring team, R.K. Lund MTI’s vice-president of engineering, initially voted against the launch. However, Jerald Mason, another vice-president asked Lund to take off “his engineering hat” and put on “his manager hat.” Lund changed his vote to continue with the launch. The information that had persuaded Lund to scrub the launch as an engineer no longer persuaded him as a manager. When examined through the lens of register, the tone of the communication changed and the tone that Lund, the engineer, found persuasive, was no longer persuasive, to Lund the manager. Because the register shifted, the engineers’ words no longer had the same meaning to Lund. SFL illuminates the ways in which the extra-semantic elements of communication contribute to meaning.

To analyze register of the call center calls, I plan to analyze a set of calls—probably five both successful and unsuccessful (as described above)—by diagramming the sentences in the calls to create a rubric to analyze 1) grammar, especially verb usage, 2) references and their antecedents particularly references with antecedents outside the spoken language of the call, 3) word choice—polite, colloquial, sarcastic etc. and 4) discourse style. 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 forty to fifty calls once I’ve used the pilot to create a diagramming and coding system. I’ll look for standards to impose to exclude diagramming every sentence of every call and also look for software that might make diagramming these calls easier. Diagramming every sentence of fifty calls might not be feasible. Forey and Lockwood (2007) analyzed only 13 calls in their data set, so I believe a small pilot plus an additional 40-45 calls should be sufficient to identify some problems. The goal of this research is not to identify all the cultural issues that complicate communication just some of the issues.

Before analyzing the calls, I propose analyzing three other types of data 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 rely on standard content analysis techniques and the software program Nvivo to uncover the scope and frequency of complaints about adherence to a script, accents etc. I’ll probably quantify such complaints even though the self-selection of the blog participants would render any quantitative analysis suspect. Quantitative analysis should give me some general idea how much these issues affect disgruntled customers. In other words, if only one customer complains about call center workers being overly polite, he or she may be an exception or representative of an entire group of customers—there simply isn’t enough data to tell. However, if 10% of the complaints about Indian call center workers mention their overly polite manner, that’s probably an indication that’s a problem for at least some clients and bears looking into. Such analysis won’t allow any conclusive statements, but it will uncover pertinent issues.

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 content 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.

Additionally to get the perspective of the call center workers themselves, I’ll interview at least five call center supervisors about their beliefs regarding miscommunications between Indian call center workers and U.S. clients. Then I’ll analyze a block of telephone calls as I’ve described above.

In Defense of Linguistic Imperialism
Finally I feel obligated to discuss this dissertation topic in light of critiques from critical applied linguists and others that such research furthers the cause of American English linguistic hegemony. After all, this research will not result in Americans learning to speak to others more sensitively, but rather it seeks to find problems with communication that can be used to teach Indians to understand and speak to Americans better in English. If it’s successful, it will increase American cultural imperialism on one limited level. On the other hand, it will result in less frustration and a more pleasant working environment for those who choose to staff call centers. And generally, the outsourcing of business processes to India has improved the standard of living for Indians. (In 1984-1985 India’s middle class represented 10% of its population. In 2003 the middle class had more than tripled largely as a result of business process outsourcing from English speaking western nations (Kobayashi-Hillary 2004). The current generation of well-educated Indians has many more employment options in India both in business process outsourcing as well as in the industries that India’s new economic prosperity has fostered. Ideally, this research will make the difficult job of staffing a call center easier with the understanding that ultimately business process outsourcing provides Indians the choice to find employment and propagate their culture inside India as they have been doing successfully outside India for generations.

Dissertation Outline
For the time being, I imagine the organization of my dissertation to be information driven (i.e. gathering 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 and call center manager interviews: a description of how I collected data from the training materials, what the data was, and an analysis of the data as well an analysis of the interviews I conducted with call center managers.
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

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

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