Ian On The Red Dot

My work requires me to talk to many people from different countries over the phone.  Some of them are users who need support and it can be extremely frustrating at times to communicate with these individuals because it is really tough to guide them if you cannot see what they are doing.  Yet I’m lucky - I don’t think my life is as bad as this guy who wrote a blog called ‘Call Center Purgatory‘.

Then there are those who are virtual teammates, people scattered across the Asia Pacific region, working together to get the job done.  The difficulty in communication with these individuals is that English is not their first language.  Actually, come to think of it, the problem isn’t that they aren’t good in English, the issue is the accent when they speak.  I’m sure my Singaporean accent with the sprinkling of Singlish can’t be much of a joy for them either.

There was one night when I had to stay back in the office till about 2am to get some issues resolved over at Korea.  There was this Korean lady who had just returned from her maternity leave working together with me to fix the stuff.  Because I can’t speak Korean, we had to communicate in English which was much easier on me than it was on her.  She wasn’t well that day and her cough was really bad (either that or she was hinting to our bosses that it was time to go home).  I could hear it over the phone but I couldn’t do anything about it.  There was a certain sense of helplessness that a colleague, albeit one that I haven’t met in person, was suffering.  I have stayed back to finish work when I was sick and I know that the feeling isn’t too awesome.

Anyway, that night a bunch of us was on a conference call so she had some of her Korean counterparts on the line too.  When she talked to them in Korean, even with the cough, you could sense the joy in her voice - it brought a smile to my face.  The minute she felt free to speak in her native tongue, there was no trace of stress or frustration in her voice.

Outsourcing of business operations isn’t anything new but it is something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit ever since I started working.  One of the things I wonder is that has anyone ever considered the effect of communicating with overseas colleagues on stress levels.  While costs for a company might have gone down because of outsourcing, has there been any consideration for the costs on individuals to work in such globally connected environments.  Some reading on my part is in order to understand this.

One of the other things I’ve been wondering about is the forming of emotional connections with these individuals you do not see.  I haven’t met this Korean lady but I have already started wondering how her kid is doing and whether she had enough rest before returning to work.  But such a connection is an illusion (not least because I think she isn’t a least bit concerned about my health) and I wonder how people cope with these sort of disconnected connectedness.  Actually, is it even something that needs to be coped with?

I wonder what sort of connections will be made between individuals if outsourcing of consumer services  takes off.