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Essay / Analysis of the article “Case Study on Intercultural Communication Issues for Filipino Call Center Staff and Their Australian Customers” by Alison Owens
The article “Case Study on Intercultural Communication Issues Intercultural Communication for Filipino Call Center Staff and Their Australian Customers "" was written by Alison Owens (2008), a senior Australian research associate. Its main objective is to observe the current challenges of intercultural business communication by telephone, taking into account international technological development. Through an analysis of telephone conversations between Australian customers and Filipino call center staff of a multinational company, the author emphasizes the quality of intercultural service to consumers (Owens, 2008). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Management and operations employees were involved in a series of interviews over a few months, and the data was obtained through conversational analysis of telephone conversations in order to recognize the main sociolinguistic and sociocultural issues of offshoring for such businesses. The results demonstrate that there were a variety of cross-cultural communication challenges for Filipino staff and Australian customers, including differences in accent, humor, naming systems, or specific facts. However, clients showed a very tolerant attitude towards linguistic and cultural dissimilarities present in telephone dialogues. It is worth noting that Australian customers have not expressed dissatisfaction with the accent and the number of complaints against Philippine operators has not exceeded the number of complaints against local operators. Owens (2008) comes to the conclusion that there is no evidence that sociolinguistic and sociocultural issues have had a destructive impact on customer satisfaction or the outcome of the transaction. Thus, the benefits are evident when offshoring activities are carefully managed. Considering the strengths of the article, the research objective was first clearly stated and then achieved by using accurate evidence and appropriate research method to measure customer response. Next, keywords are well defined and section headings give a good overview of the main points. Understanding the limitations of the study, Owens (2008) also suggests further exploring the communication success of other non-Australian call center workers and the opinions of Australian customers who receive these offshore calls. Finally, raising the question of the complexity of intercultural communication in companies, the article is still relevant today. To illustrate, Gube (2013) similarly addresses the cross-cultural communication challenges of Filipino call center workers with their foreign customers and reaches similar conclusions. Additionally, the Philippines has already overtaken “India as the call center capital of the world” (Lee, 2015), and this is a growing trend, which is why it is essential to study call centers Filipino calls and related outsourcing companies where more than a million people are employed (Lee, 2015). Owens therefore justifies the particular importance of cross-cultural communication issues and gives convincing evidence of the benefits of such offshoring activities. On the other hand, the article has some weaknesses that are worth mentioning. Firstly, the selected research method is not efficient enough to cover a certain..