Dealing with Angry Western Customers in Asian Call Centres: A Cultural Divide?

Call centres have been offshored from countries such as the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (USA) to Asian destinations such as the Philippines and India where the customer services representatives (CSRs) do not speak English as their mother tongue and are not acculturated to Western norms of doing customer service. This is further complicated by the fact that call centre work is carried out on the phone; therefore, the CSRs do not have the affordance of face-to-face exchange. Using in-depth authentic exchanges from a specialized corpus of call centre interactions, this chapter reports on angry and frustrated exchanges between US and UK customers and Filipino CSRs. We argue that despite the high English proficiency levels of the CSRs, dealing with angry and sarcastic native speaker callers is extraordinarily difficult , not only from a language point of view but also from a cultural standpoint. We explore how culture is crystallized in these exchanges. By doing so, we hope to gain a better understanding of how CSRs may ultimately benefit from further language and intercultural training and support.