Alliance Member Deepak Desai Interviewed by Washington Post & San Jose Mercury News
December 14, 2008

San Jose Mercury News Interview by Sue McAllister 

Deepak Desai is chief executive of Global English, a Brisbane-based company that provides businesses with online technology and services that teach employees to communicate in English. Global English's clients include tech companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and Applied Materials, along with manufacturers like Hitachi and pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline. Deloitte, another client, just named Global English to its "Silicon Valley Technology Fast 50" list of fast-growing companies. The privately owned company has 175 employees in 16 countries.

Global English sells usage licenses to companies, typically for a year at a time, normally for $500 per employee user per year, then provides access to online learning tools. In addition to online curriculum, students can use the round-the-clock "talk to a teacher" help line or listen to audio samples of people speaking English with French, Pakistani or Irish accents, to name a few. There's even a widget that will translate text into spoken English using different accents. Users can learn at their own pace, and practice the skills they most want to acquire, whether writing, speaking or reading in English. Learning plans can be tailored to suit the employee. A medical devices salesperson might need one kind of help, for example, while a call center worker might need another.

"Our goal is not to improve your English so you can read Shakespeare," Desai said; "it's to improve your English so you can do your job."

Desai, who spent much of his career at Time Warner, talked recently with Mercury News staff writer Sue McAllister about his company, and about why studying English continues to gain importance for global businesses. Here is an edited version of excerpts of their conversation:

Q How does your online learning tool work?

A Language learning is a very complex undertaking, but the tools available online are perfect for language learning. A PC has tools, for example, for recording and playback — it's a great appliance for language learning. You can be in your own home and practice a single sound over and over again.

Q And you can customize your product depending on how proficient someone is?

A Yes. For example, some people are good at reading and writing but not at speaking and listening, and with an online offering you can tailor your own learning experience in a particular way. Having an Internet-delivered tool also is really valuable because you can do it anytime you want. Another issue is that students, especially in Asia, don't like to be wrong in front of others. If they can do it in the privacy of their own setting, nobody is wiser if they are making mistakes.

Our other vision is to democratize the process of learning English. People learn English because they want to improve themselves, they want to get plugged into the global world. About 400 million people have English as a first language and 600 million more are learning English or are fairly fluent in English. It's the first time in the history of the world that there are more people speaking English than are native speakers. Our goal as a company is to focus on this mega-problem.

Q Why is it a problem?

A You don't have enough teachers. Think about the scale there. I think a software solution is scalable, is effective and can be personalized as well. We've broken our curriculum into 20-minute, bite-size activities. There are listening, speaking, vocabulary and grammar exercises and then within those assignments you have activities. You might listen to a passage or some interactions then have a series of questions. The system also tells you what (assignments) you said you were going to do, and what you have been doing, and then a report goes to your manager.

Q Which skill is hardest for people to learn?

A Speaking. Speaking is very difficult. Many people around the world are taught English in school, but the challenge is that the teachers themselves are not fluent in speaking it. You tend to teach people what you are comfortable with, which is mostly reading and writing.

Q Do students speak English with anyone as they learn?

A Yes, through the software we can have something very similar to conversation. If you want to talk to a teacher, we have live chats with trained teachers, and people can go in and practice, ask questions or seek help if they need to. We are also introducing soon a "business lounge," a Web 2.0-type community that will allow people more practice with what they learn. That was in response to what many of our customers were saying, especially younger ones. Students will be able to interact, ask and answer questions, share documents and enable voice chat. We are trying to explore this whole phenomenon of Web 2.0 in the context of language learners.

Q Who and where are your primary clients?

A We are focused on the global 2000 companies, companies that have significant work forces outside their home countries. About 40 percent of our clients are based in the U.S., about 40 percent in Europe, and 20 percent in Latin America and Asia.

Q Are you teaching customer service workers? Executives?

A It's a mix. We have pharmaceutical salespeople in Japan, we might have call center workers, designers, engineers. For companies like Deloitte it's tax professionals.

Q Give me an example of how learning English helps all these different workers.

A Even doing e-mail, for instance. For a lot of these companies, a lot of e-mail is in English. If you're not fluent in understanding certain things, it takes you three or four hours a day doing e-mail. Typically our customers save about 1 to 11/2 hours a week per person once people are six or 12 months into the program. We are seeing programmatic success for our customers and that's why we are seeing growth as well.

Q How has the economic downturn affected Global English?

A It is going to affect us. We have been growing significantly in the last several years; up until the third quarter we grew sales 44 percent year over year. In the fourth quarter I think we'll see a slight drop in growth, but we'll still continue to grow.

Q Why do you think learning English will gain importance?

A English has become a common means of communication. It's not going to replace other languages, but it's going to supplement them. To build communication with others around the world, you will need a tool, and English is it. It's what I call a very open-source language, and for all its quirkiness it's become the language of choice for businesses.

The Bangalore Backlash: Call Centers Return to U.S.
Some Firms See Value in Familiar Voices
 
By Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post Staff Writer

If you prefer a customer service agent who speaks "American," then computer maker Dell has a deal for you.

Catering to consumers put off by the accents of Bangalore, Manila and other call-center hubs around the globe, Dell will guarantee -- for a price -- that the person who picks up the phone on a support call will be, as company ads mention in bold text, "based in North America."

The Your Tech Team service, with agents in the United States, costs $12.95 a month for customers with a Dell account, or $99 a year for people who buy a new computer. It also promises that wait times will average two minutes or less. Without the upgrade, a customer is likely to get technical help from someone in India, the Philippines or the other places where Dell has operators.

By charging customers extra for a North American voice, Dell's program represents a novel strategy for easing the strains of globalization while maintaining profit, industry officials said.

Occasionally, "we've heard from customers that it's hard to understand a particular accent and that they couldn't understand the instructions they were getting," said Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman. "This illustrates Dell's commitment to customer choice."

Complaints about customer service agents based in other countries are an everyday phenomenon across several industries. For many U.S. consumers, the diverse accents that come across customer service lines constitute one of the most pervasive reminders of globalization and the offshoring of jobs. That can make personnel in the call center targets for American anger.

Companies can save 50 to 75 percent on their call centers by putting them overseas, according to industry analysts.

But getting a customer service agent with whom it is easy to communicate ought to be a service that is provided gratis, some industry analysts said.

"Most people in the customer service world believe that if you have sold me a product, then support for that product should be free," said Lyn Kramer, managing director of Kramer and Associates, a call-center consultancy.

Jitterbug, a cellphone company that markets to older Americans, similarly boasts in ads that its operators are in the United States, but it does not charge extra to speak to them. The company's television spots advertise "U.S. based customer service" and show a headset draped in an American flag.

"You'd be amazed how many customers ask, 'Where are you based?' " said David Inns, Jitterbug's chief executive. "The response we get when we say, 'We're in Auburn Hills, Michigan, ma'am,' -- well, they love it."

Although airlines, banks and some retailers have overseas call centers, computer makers have been particularly apt to put call centers in foreign countries. According to an online survey conducted by CFI Group, more than a third of respondents who recently made a call for computer support reported that the person they reached was outside the United States.

The customer satisfaction score for overseas PC call centers was 23 percent lower than for U.S. call centers, CFI Group reported.

"The customers say, 'The agent just doesn't understand what I'm trying to do,' " Kramer said. "The customer explains his or her request three or four times, and then they get a rote answer back."

Many companies, she said, have "escalation procedures" to use when callers struggle to communicate; eventually, many such calls are routed back to the United States.

Though some have suggested that the friction between U.S. consumers and foreign operators arises from prejudice, some observers see it differently.

"I hear people say all the time that people who complain about call centers in India are being racist or nativist -- but it's not as simple as that," said Sharmila Rudrappa, a sociology professor at University of Texas at Austin and native of Bangalore, India. "If you need tech support, it already shows you're having a crazy time getting your Dell computer to work. And when things go haywire, you want assurance, you want familiarity, you want someone to hold your hand and say it's okay. What you don't want is to have to work at understanding the person on the other end of the line."

Deepak Desai, chief executive of GlobalEnglish, a company that sells a program to improve the business-English skills of overseas workers, attributed at least some of the problem to the fact that call center industry has grown so fast in India that the companies have had trouble recruiting employees who have mastered the language.

"There's a large chunk of people who can communicate in English somewhat, but if you put them on a call interacting with an angry American -- that's hard," he said.

Though the job puts them in contact with people halfway around the world who are often upset about something -- a missed reservation, a technical problem, an accounting snafu -- many in developing countries consider such a spot in a call center "a good job," Desai said. They try to learn American slang, to say "zee" instead of "zed," and they take on American-sounding nicknames such as Jimmy.

"People in the developing countries are hungry for any material that will improve their skills," Desai said. "There's a real hunger to improve. It's not that we want these people to be speaking with an American accent. We want them to be intelligible."

Enough Americans are frustrated by them, however, that companies such as Jitterbug have concluded that keeping their call centers in the United States is the best option.

Inns said the company briefly considered putting call center overseas -- he, too, had heard that costs could be radically cut.

But he said those estimates leave out the cost of frustrating customers.

"What's missing from those estimates is what the impact is on customer satisfaction and what is the impact on first-call resolution" -- that is, resolving the issue in one try.

"This is not a protectionist philosophy," he said. "At the end of the day, my data and experience say that Americans are better at providing customer service to Americans -- that's all."

Dell declined to release numbers on how many people had signed up for the Your Tech Team service, but Kaufman said officials have been pleased by the response.

"That part of the business -- the Your Tech Team -- has grown, and we think that customers will continue to value it," Kaufman said.