Global Post: by Patrick Winn —

BANGKOK, Thailand — It’s a call center cliche, familiar to many Americans who’ve picked up phones to contest bogus bank charges or gripe about a laptop on the skids.

The agent who answers goes by a common US name, perhaps Larry or Jennifer. Yet the accent is unmistakably Indian, sometimes hard to comprehend or laced with unfamiliar idioms.

It’s no secret that Indian call centers have an accent problem. That problem is now proving to be incredibly costly. Accents, according to one of the nation’s top trade associations, are largely to blame for India losing 70 percent of its call center industry to the Philippines. Call centers shifting from India to the Philippines will be responsible for $30 billion in lost foreign exchange earnings this decade.

The head of India’s Associated Chambers of Commerce offers a blunt assessment of his nation’s accent-related woes. “Employees in Philippines call centers speak English fluently with a neutral accent, which is what customers look for and that is something missing in Indian accents,” said D.S. Rawat, the group’s general secretary. “That is a prime reason why [call center] business is thriving in that country.”

Of course, a “neutral” accent is in the ear of the beholder. To call centers, that beholder is America, the world’s largest pool of consumers and the nation call centers are incentivized to placate.

India, a former British colony, is second only to the United States when it comes to the volume of English speakers. But the Philippines — a moderately poor former American colony — has a larger base of English-fluent workers who can more easily pull off a California accent or even chitchat about American Idol. For a $500-per-month salary, they have what it takes to sooth grumpy callers irate over cell phone roaming fees.

Americans on the line with one of the Philippines’ rapidly expanding call centers may have no idea they’re connected to a tropical archipelago in Southeast Asia. To the American ear, Filipino speech can sound similar to the Latino accent, a linguistic legacy of three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines.

“Accent is a big part of the story,” said Gillian Virata, senior executive director of the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines, or IBPAP. “We have a ‘neutral’ accent and we don’t speak fast. Some Indians do because their dialect affects the way they speak English.”

The English language proliferated in the Philippines after the US triumphed in the Spanish-American war in 1898 and took the island nation as its spoils. The next five decades of US occupation were characterized by gruesome subjugation but also the rise of a public education system emphasizing English.

More:  http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/140430/how-the-philippines-crushing-the-indian-call-center-