Teaching overseas workers how to appear American

By Angie Wong

On the first day of class in a new office building in Mumbai, India, Brinda Surendar, an "American accent and culture trainer" who teaches overseas workers how to speak and behave like Americans, shows potential Indian customer service employees an episode of the TV show "Friends."

The show is meant to offer an example of how Americans live and behave for students who have never been to America but who have to learn about the culture to work as telephone customer service representatives in India.

Surendar received her undergraduate degree in English from SUNY Albany two years ago and teaches her students, mostly in their early twenties and many of who hold graduate degrees, American Culture 101. Her class is aimed at helping the students secure jobs at leading outsourcing companies like India's TransWorks, which has a roster of U.S. clients that include the top five banks on the Fortune 500. The company, with headquarters in Bangalore and Mumbai, expects to triple its workforce by May 2005 to meet the growth in outsourcing.
To get these highly desirable jobs, candidates must not only be fluent in English, they must also be fluent in how Americans speak and act.

At a time when job security weighs heavily on the minds of many Americans, and when many workers are outraged about service jobs being shipped abroad to low wage workforces in Asia and throughout the developing world, it is ironic that some Americans are making a living teaching Indian replacement workers how to appear more American.

According to CNN's "Moneyline," 2 million American jobs have been lost to outsourcing to countries like India since 2001. Unlike outsourcing in the 1980s, which mostly involved manufacturing, a large sector of today's lost jobs are customer service positions that demand person-to-person contact because the workers have to interact directly with phone clients.
Companies like TransWorks, which handle technical phone support and telemarketing services for such companies as Microsoft and Citibank, are popping up all over India's version of Silicon Valley. They are creating hot new real estate areas like the new Prestige Blue Chip Park in Bangalore.

The demand has created a hiring frenzy, but finding employees who can speak and understand the way Americans talk is difficult. Many American training centers have opened in response.
Surendar, for example, runs a 14-day training course at TransWorks in Mumbai to teach potential telephone customer service employees how to erase the singsong quality of Indians speaking English. She also familiarizes them with American foods, pop culture and current events. She says the training days are filled with voice exercises, history textbook memorizations and culture tests. In order to keep her students attentive after a nine-hour day, she screens videos like "Bruce Almighty," "Charlie's Angels" and "Something about Mary" as examples of American life.

Surendar recognizes her students' reluctance to use American slang and phrases. "You have to remember, I'm asking highly skilled professionals to role play Jim Carrey, and some of them feel like fools," Surendar says.

She says the most difficult part of the process is getting students to retrain their mouth muscles. "American phrases are big and drawn out, whereas Indian speakers are used to speaking quick, closed-mouthed," she says, "My students are not used to opening their mouths so much."
After the intensive training course, potential employees cram for the job-placement test, which includes reading a passage filled with rolling R's (a sound Indians have trouble pronouncing) and knowing every abbreviation for each state in America and the most recent sport scores of the Oakland A's baseball team.

"I didn't even know who the A's were until someone told me," says Anne Cooke, an American linguist and independent trainer based in Los Angeles. She has been training Indians how to speak and be more American for companies like General Electric and Dell since the early 1990s. After living in Paris, Madrid and Tokyo, Cooke started an accent correction business.
According to Cooke, some call centers will filter the service representative voices to sound lower than they actually are through the headsets to help "disguise their ethnic pitch."

Indians "tend to speak English at a really high pitch and they tend to snip off the end of words, which, when they speak, appears like they are being short-tempered with you, even when they don't mean to be," Cooke says. She teaches Indian executives to lower their voice and relax their speech to sound more "authoritative and confident" when dealing with Westerners.

"A slower, lower voice is a great way to combat a testy phone client who wants to vent," Cooke tells her students when dealing with clients who just want to take out their anger over the phone.

They are also taught to be more assertive. "My students think I'm teaching them to be rude," Cooke says. "I believe I'm teaching them to be more direct." Employees are encouraged to practice the American language and mannerisms outside the workplace to make them second nature.

It's especially disconcerting to learn that Indians disapprove of the way Americans speak, Cooke says. One of Cooke's students told her that his father would throw him out of the house if he talked to him in the fashion he was being taught in her class.
Cooke says Americans tend to compound words and "hiccup phrases" like "t'was," as in it was, and "jeet," as in did you eat.

Not only do they need to perfect their American speech, they also need to perfect their American attitudes. One of the biggest challenges Indian customer service reps have is showing sympathy to customers. "Many Indians come off sounding very robotic" when speaking English, Cooke says. "I teach them to add a sigh or an 'Oh, I understand your situation' to offer customers an ear of sympathy, which makes the whole customer service experience much more enjoyable."

TransWorks also has British clients who outsource telephone customer service jobs to India. "We have dedicated a selection of our employees to support our U.K. clients," says Abhay Chauhan, assistant vice president of business development at TransWorks. "They are trained to speak with British accents." Many Indians applying to work for a British company via TransWorks believe they already understand British culture and speak with a British accent because they had a connection with the English when the British occupied India. "They think they speak with a British accent, but they don't," says Cooke. "We have accent trainers for that, too."

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