BY BRENDAN READ, CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE; Q & A WITH SHARATH KESHAVA NARAYANA, SANAS

ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE IMAGES

Accents are deeply personal, shaped by geography, language, socioeconomic class, gender, and by one’ s own identity. Just as voice prints can identify individuals, accents reveal where they are from: in ways that can impact how they’ re heard, perceived, and reacted to and engaged with by others.

Class and accents are central to the plot of the film My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw’ s play Pygmalion, in which, to win a bet, Dr. Henry Higgins tries to turn London Cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle into an upper-class“ lady.”

My family loved the film and had the soundtrack’ s LP. For good reason. We’ re from northern England, which is noted for a distinct accent( and its class variations), that one can hear on many movies and shows, notably Coronation Street, which is reportedly the world’ s longest-running TV soap opera.

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SHARATH KESHAVA NARAYANA

Not surprisingly, accents can impede customer experience( CX) in the contact center, causing what can be termed as“ accent friction” and leading to misunderstandings and frustration on both sides of conversations.

Contact centers have long sought to address this issue through accent training. Now there are also automated AIbased tools that can help people understand each other across accents.