Do you Converse in the Dialect Derived of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue?
or the ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ of Basic Communication
Have you ever found yourself on the phone to one of the multitude of call centres trying to find out a little information, or rectify a problem? I’m sure you have, and I’m sure that you’ve wondered why you’re unable to get a straightforward answer from an advisor. This probably isn’t too bad if your enquiry is quite basic, but hit them with something a little more complicated and you’ll most likely find yourself in a world of non-committal answers. Before you blame the ‘ineptitude’ of the advisor, spare a thought for the environment they’re working in, and the business requirements they have to meet.
They are representatives of a company, as such they are required to meet the business requirements of that company - those requirements mean that the advisors have to speak to customers in a certain way. There is of course a degree of common sense to this, any company would naturally wish to be seen as friendly, professional, cooperative and courteous. Some companies do this by addressing customers formerly, some choose to adopt an informal manner and request to use your first name. It includes ensuring that you apologise, that you say please and thank you, that you listen to a customer and demonstrate that you understand their enquiry. All perfectly reasonable, and the kind of communication you would expect of professional and civilised people. On the flip side, this also means scrutinising the language advisors use to converse with customers, this includes defining words or phrases as inappropriate or negative. It’s a wonderful idea if those words are restricted to the obscene or directly offensive, I think we can all pretty much agree that swear words and racism aren’t going to improve a situation, but saying ‘hi’ instead of ‘hello’! The problem with ‘hi’ is the informality of the abbreviation of the word, it’s considered to be slang. Also a word like ‘unfortunately’ would demonstrate negativity, even when used in a positive context, e.g:
Unfortunately your delivery didn’t arrive because of the adverse weather conditions, however, as a gesture of goodwill we have rescheduled your delivery and included a diamond encrusted gold Rolex to compensate for the inconvenience.
Bit of an extreme example, but you catch my drift. The problem with this isn’t the customers or the advisors, the problem is the business that requires the misappropriation of language in order to satisfy some bogus objective. An objective which is important simply because the company have decided it’s important. Don’t, whatever you do use the word ‘don’t’ in their vicinity, especially if you’re committing the cardinal sin of admitting that you ‘don’t know’ something and you have absolutely no way of finding out. Why? Well because, quite frankly it’s above your pay grade, and the company have deemed you too unimportant to have access to the information you need in order to deliver a positive and appropriate response to the customer. God forbid that you should be insufficiently qualified to cure Mrs Smith’s dog’s cancer, and advise the distraught lady that you ‘can’t’ do it instead of being ‘unable’ to do it. Even then, even if you get it right and tell her you’re ‘unable’ to do this, then for heavens sake, make sure that you advise her what you are able to do for her.
All attempts at humorous sarcasm aside, the tragedy of this is that I’m serious about this bastardisation of language, you really can’t use these words in some of our call centres. Personally I think it’s utterly absurd and should be treated with the absolute contempt it deserves, however, I believe that this genuinely affects the quality of the service we receive as customers, it also negatively affects the advisors.
When you make a call to one of these places you will be advised that the ‘call may be monitored for training purposes’. What this means is assessment of the advisor you speak to, in order to maintain a level of service it is reasonable for a company to monitor the quality of its output. Fine, but these assessments also include whether or not the aforementioned ‘negative’ words are used and this can have a detrimental effect on the advisor. If it causes them to consistently fail the assessment they can be penalised, in the short term this can mean forfeiting a bonus, we’re not talking banker bonus’ here, but we are talking about a little extra cash for a workforce that will generally be earning considerably less than the national average - it makes a difference. If this behaviour persists it means that their suitability for the role can come into question, this can mean sanctions, by sanctions I mean warnings and by this I ultimately mean dismissal.
What about how it affects us as customers using this service? Well it means that you’re dealing with people who lack the confidence to do their job properly, just in case what they ultimately end up doing is communicating with you in the wrong way. They can’t commit to an answer about an advert you’ve seen saying one thing when what the company have decided is that it means something else. Beware of the word interpretation whenever it is used by a large organisation, interpretation in this context will generally mean what they intended it to say and not what it actually said. The advisors in this situation are afraid of saying the wrong thing, not the logical idea of the ‘wrong thing’ but the company designated definition of the ‘wrong thing’. It undermines their confidence in how they fulfil their role, leaving them frustrated and the customers no closer to a resolution.
There seems to be an increase in this desire to redefine our basic communication, especially by businesses and politicians. Orwell famously referred to it as ‘Doublespeak’, a lovely noun with it’s own wonderfully informative entry in the dictionary:
noun
[mass noun]
deliberately euphemistic, ambiguous, or obscure language:
the art of political doublespeak
What concerns me about this increasing ambiguity is what it can lead to, aside from a society which speaks one thing and means another, it has a rather worrying historical precedent.
Propagandists use language and slogans to disguise their true meaning. When the Nazi’s used the term ‘The Jewish Question’ it could be interpreted any number of ways - what it resulted in was a ‘Final Solution’, and this solution was genocide. These two fairly innocuous phrases referred to the extermination of 6 million people, it meant degradation, starvation, torture and death. Robert Jackson in his closing address at the Nuremberg Trials put it a little more eloquently:
Nor is the lie direct the only means of falsehood. They all speak with a Nazi double talk with which to deceive the unwary. In the Nazi dictionary of sardonic euphemisms "final solution" of the Jewish problem was a phrase which meant extermination "special treatment" of prisoners of war meant killing; "protective custody" meant concentration camp; "duty labor" meant slave labor; and an order to "take a firm attitude" or "take positive measures" meant to act with unrestrained savagery. Before we accept their word at what seems to be its face, we must always look for hidden meanings.
In doing this the Nazis eroded people’s perception of what was happening, the phraseology was so benign that it couldn’t possibly mean anything as sinister as genocide. You become desensitised to this corruption of language, especially when its corruption is gradual. At first your Jewish neighbours are being relocated, three years later they’re being reduced to anonymous constituents of a pile of hair and shoes, all in the quest to resolve the ‘Jewish Question’.
Even now we use phrases like ‘extraordinary rendition’, which can mean kidnap, imprisonment and torture. ‘Collateral damage’ is the acceptable spin on the inadvertent death of numerous innocent civilians in a war zone, like the entire population of a village accidentally stepped out in front of a guided missile.
To make it a little more everyday, how about ‘job flexibility’, which sounds like a nice thing to have, but what it really means is a lack of job security. ‘Outsourcing labour’ means dismissing existing staff and bringing in a cheaper workforce, with even less job security than those of you with job flexibility. And finally ‘downsize’, which makes everything sound like it’s going to be made all neat and trim, but what will actually happen is a very large part of a company will become unemployed.
Whilst I would never dare to consider the idiocy of call centre processes to be the same thing as the events leading to Nazi genocide, I think it’s worth baring in mind exactly what the corruption of language is capable of doing. It is detrimental to our society to evolve such a convoluted way of communicating, and history shows that the people who adopt this approach are very rarely ever people you should trust. As Orwell wrote in Politics and the Political Language:
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting ink.
So ask yourself a question, do you converse in the dialect derived of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, or do you simply speak English?
