It takes 3 milliseconds for someone to analyse your accent. In those three milliseconds your accent will have yielded three types of stereotype information. It tells of your superiority; your attractiveness and your dynamism.

Your superiority is an assessment of your education and status based on how you speak. Different people react differently to your accent. Some at least will find it attractive. How you speak conveys your enthusiasm and action orientation. All this is based upon the way the you articulate, and pronounce. That can be a regional accent in your own country or the accent with which you speak a foreign language. I learnt all this from a academic experiment described at a conference I attended this week.

They posed a simple question about the accents of servers in a restaurant. Around the world servers are more often speaking a foreign language. They are not from the country and they are not speaking their native language. The researchers were interested in whether the accents created stereotypes. Did those stereotypes then influence customers’ expectations of the service they would receive. This is increasingly true when we telephone a call or contact center. If we find someone talking English with an Indian accent our expectations fall. This is not a comment on India or Indians but on the fact that our supplier has outsourced their customer handling. Unfortunately, Indian call centers are also perceived as low cost suppliers.

In their study the researchers had three settings. Two were transactional or order taking. The third was a Mexican Restaurant. The study took place in the USA and they used a US and a Mexican accent. Unsurprisingly a Mexican accent in a Mexican restaurant was perceived positively. It conveyed authenticity. In other settings the Mexican accent depressed expectations. This was true even for Mexican respondents. It turns out that these tourists saw the staff as immigrants and of a lower social status.

Is there an “Old” accent?

We are heading towards a world were the number of workers available is in decline. Fertility has been falling around the world and with it the number of people of working age. There are less and less young people. There are three strategies available to a country facing employee shortages. They can increase the number of immigrants. This will work for a while but it will become increasingly politically sensitive. The second is to increase the number of women working and/or the hours that they work. In many parts of the world female participation in the workforce is still not at the same level as men. This offers more opportunities to women. Unfortunately, this can also accentuate the underlying fertility problem.

The third is to increase the age of retirement. If people work later into their lives the workforce will increase. This would mean that in the future call centers might be staffed with teams of agents all over 65. Will the callers be able to assess the age of their agent from their voice? Is there an “Old” accent? If there is then the voice will convey the “Old” stereotype. Part of this should be positive. Older people are stereotyped as friendly and caring. They should be attractive agents. Unfortunately, the stereotype also conveys a decline in cognitive and physical ability. Will this convey less dynamism?

The” Old” stereotype is already seen as a barrier to being recruited. Ageism in recruitment is still an issue. Life in a call center is not easy. The agent is caught between their organization and the customer. They are in what is called a boundary spanning role. They will often be given conflicting targets by the organization and the customer. Worse still the role of an agent often comes with multiple organizational objectives. They are under pressure to be efficient. They must minimize the amount of time they spend with a customer. At the same time they must ensure that the customer is satisfied. It all gets even more complicated if they are also given a sales target!

Can we lose the stereotypes?

Of course, the stereotypes are wrong. “Old” is not easy to stereotype anymore. A 70-year-old can be a senior athlete or someone who is infirm. They can be retired or just starting a second career. The start of any cognitive decline has been pushed in to the 80’s for most people. We are living longer and healthier. 80 might indeed be the new 70 and 70 the new 60. We are used to the idea of ageism in the workforce. In many countries there is legislation to protect older workers from discrimination. This is a different problem. Consumers can be just as ageist as organizations.

More older people working will change the stereotype. If service levels delivered by older teams are high then the stereotype is destroyed. As we saw last week at least our self-stereotypes are recognizing healthy ageing.