How Multicultural Training Misfired and Caused a New Indian Call Center to Fold in a Year

With Multicultural Training, the “How” is as important as the “What”

As the holidays approach, I’m reminded of the lively Expat holiday parties in Bangalore amid the palm trees and balmy breezes.  One year there was a British expat who kept us laughing with his trials and tribulations of setting up a call center to service British customers of a high-end insurance provider.

His stories were a steady stream of misunderstandings between Indian employees at the call center and their British customers, mostly small stuff.  But small as the misunderstandings were, the client complaints that followed seemed never-ending.  The insurance company ultimately decided that the risk of further damage to customer relations was too high to keep the call center in India.  The small stuff did the call center in.

How small can a misunderstanding be to cause a complaint? Well, take the “lost wife.”

"An elderly gentleman called regarding a life insurance policy to report he 'lost his wife',” the expat said. "After my new customer service representative collected his information, and just before hanging up, she sincerely told the gentleman that she hoped he 'finds his wife'."

I know, this doesn’t sound particularly funny on the page. But it resonated with my fellow expats who all have stories, some funny and others cringe-inducing, of people genuinely being polite and coming across just the opposite.

The point though, is that the call center reps were misunderstanding the real meaning of everyday British phrases like “lost my wife,” and customer complaints soaring because of it. “Lost my wife” merely illustrated misunderstandings so frequent and widespread that the center closed about a year after it opened. The call center rep’s work ethic and desire to please couldn’t compensate for improper training to do the job. Most of her coworkers had the same problem.

All of this could have been prevented if the expat hadn’t made a cultural mistake himself—misunderstanding the kind of training Indians needed for providing international call center service.

He thought the insurance company had a great training program.  The program anticipated cultural gaps, which included teaching the reps common British phrases and slang. There were even courses in developing British accents. However, while the call center training was good regarding what cultural differences to train for, it was not so good regarding cultural differences in how to train.

This distinction was at the root of the call center’s problems and sometimes it’s hard to identify. Training sessions were consistently well attended and feedback from trainees was overwhelmingly positive. Naturally, the expat assumed the training was just as effective in India as it was in Britain. Not so.

What he learned too late is that Indians are generally adverse to admit they don't understand something. Mistakenly, he assumed the trainees were learning, based on their feedback and how well the courses were attended. Where he slipped up was not checking that they had actually learnt the material. It’s a classic training error.

In India, there is a very high degree of respect for elders and those with experience. Oddly, a consequence of this admirable attitude is difficulty creating training environments where Indian employees feel comfortable conveying that they don't understand the material. To Indians, to admit not understanding implies the trainer didn't do a good job, which in their culture seems disrespectful.  Overcoming reluctance to provide honest feedback requires that training be designed to build trust between trainer and trainees. Without it, companies can easily deceive themselves into thinking their training works.

Take it from the expat: when developing a training program in India, plan for cultural issues not only in subject matter, but the learning process itself.

If he’d known that, he might still be enjoying spiced eggnog and Tandoori turkey this holiday season.