Topic > Analysis of the article "Case Study of Intercultural Communication Issues for Filipino Call Center Staff and Their Australian Customers" by Alison Owens

The Article "Case Study of Intercultural Communication Issues for Staff of Philippine call centers and their Australian customers” ” was written by Alison Owens (2008), an Australian research associate Its main purpose is to observe the current challenges of intercultural business communication via telephone, given the international technological development. analysis of telephone conversations between Australian customers and Filipino call center staff of a multinational company, the author places emphasis on the quality of intercultural consumer service (Owens, 2008). shouldn't violent video games be banned"? Get an original essay Management and operational employees were involved in a series of interviews over a few months and the data was obtained through a conversational analysis of telephone conversations in order to recognize the main issues sociolinguistics and sociocultural aspects of relocation for these companies. The findings demonstrate that a number of cross-cultural communication issues existed for Filipino staff and Australian customers, including different accents, humour, naming systems or specific facts. However, customers showed a very tolerant attitude towards linguistic and cultural differences present in telephone dialogues. Note that Australian customers did not express dissatisfaction with the accent, and the number of complaints about Philippine operators did not exceed the number of complaints about local operators. Owens (2008) concludes that there is not a shred of evidence that sociolinguistic and sociocultural issues have destructively influenced customer satisfaction or transaction outcome. Therefore, the benefits are clear when offshoring activities are carefully managed. Considering the strengths of the article, firstly, the research objective was clearly stated and then achieved by using accurate evidence and an appropriate research method to measure customer reaction. Next, the keywords are well defined and the section titles provide 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 receiving these offshore calls. Finally, by raising the issue of the complexity of intercultural business communication, the article is still relevant. To illustrate, Gube (2013) addresses the intercultural communication challenges of Filipino call center workers with their foreign customers in the same way and reaches similar conclusions. Furthermore, the Philippines has already surpassed “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 Philippine call centers and related outsourcing activities where most more than 1 million people are employed (Lee, 2015). Thus, Owens justifies the particular relevance of intercultural communication problems and provides convincing evidence on the benefits of such offshoring activities. On the other hand, the article has some weaknesses that should be mentioned. Firstly, the selected research method is not that effective at covering a given issue in depth, and the small sample size means that this group may not be a decent representation of Australian customers' attitudes towards call staff Philippine center. In.