Who says a BPO job is easy?

Have you ever been taught to roll your r’s or soften your d’s? To bite your lower lip while speaking your v’s and to kiss your w’s? Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Then you surely don’t belong to the KPO or the BPO brigade. It might be sounding funny to take pains to learn all this, but for these employees, this is the most essential qualification required to survive in this industry. Unlike others, these organisations expect their employees to be an ‘artist’ who can twist their lips as per the job need. Not only this, employees need to change their ‘identity’ and speak like firangs. It’s not a joke and it’s not an easy task to accomplish. The purpose of the voice and accent training given to employees is to ensure that a caller from overseas feels he is talking to one of his countrymen. To facilitate this process even the names of the employees are changed. So, if you are Harvinder here, you become Harry for them! Your poor grandfather, who had decided your name so lovingly, will probably get the shock of his life. These employees go through many things to earn that fat salary package. Right from name-change to accent – they face tough training to fulfill the job demand. It is easier said that ‘they earn big money’ but the agony and pain they go through is unbelievable. One needs to be sharp to grasp the accent, because – right accent and good voice fetches them the salary. Is it easy to learn the ‘accent’? “This may differ from person to person. But yes, it takes your energy and patience as it’s difficult to get the hold on foreign language,” says Deepshikha Malhotra, an MBA HR who is currently working as an IT Recruiter for a leading MNC. She manages US-to-US IT recruitments and is presently undergoing voice and accent training. Some BPO job profiles are easier to manage as they facilitate with scripts. For example, the task of talking in accent is quiet easy for customer care executives. But for advanced processes like Deepshikha’s, it becomes tough. Since she handles the HR department, she has to take interviews from all over the world. She says, “It’s quite impossible to know all US accents. And it becomes tough while interviewing and especially when you are asked counter questions. One can never be prepared with the definite set of questions as the first one leads to the second and so on.” And no wonder she is undergoing the training for her test next week. Her job will be confirmed only if she clears the test. It will be in the form of a mock telephonic interview. She is literally in tears even at the thought of it. “I simply don’t know how to handle it. How can anyone expect fluency in an alien accent just by training someone for a few weeks?” she cribs. “I have been rehearsing for the test for some time now, but each time I try to concentrate on the accent, the conversation gets blocked and if I start getting comfortable with the conversation, the accent vanishes,” she adds. She is tensed and worried whether she would clear the test or not.

“The task does not end with learning the national accent only, you have to have a basic idea of the provincial accents as well,” says Tanishq Bakshi who is Malhotra’s colleague. These days he is busy trying to remember all the 50 states of US. “Besides accent, it is an added advantage if we know about US and the major cities. It helps especially for recruiting professionals. This not only gives personal touch to the conversation” he says. No single language has a single accent. When the language crosses from the one city to another in any country, its accent too changes. It’s just like river Ganges which tastes differently in different places