Comment from a reader on the Neutral Accent

In case some of you missed the comment to an earlier post, I'm reprinting it here for clarification. This is a reader's perspective on the "neutral accent" and sheds some light on the issue:

I'd like to give a little perspective to the use of the term "neutral accent" across BPOs in India. I joined the BPO industry in 1999 and was trained on American accent for 3months. We listened to American speakers and tried to embibe their pronunciation, intonation pattern and idioms/slang. After 3months, when we went on calls, the customers said that we had a weird accent and asked which part of America we were from. I remember a colleague of mine whose first language was Bengali interchanged the s/sh sound. So, he would roll the r like the Americans, however; would ask the customer "may i have the shocial security number?". Likewise, another colleage from another north eastern state used to interchange the oo/uh sound. So would ask "can i poot the call on hold"? However; all of us were well trained to roll the r, say caaffee instead of cawfee, aesk instead of ask. After 6 months, we were sent back to training and the objective was to get rid of the put on American accent and get the sounds rights. Thats when the term "neutral"accent came into being. It is an accent which does not have an influence of the first langauge and is globally understood. None of the native English speakers(Americans, Australians, English, Canadians) will say fud for food Or bijness for business or pleyur for pleasure but a person from the north eastern states of India will have a tendency of interchaning the long n short vowel sounds and zh/z Or s/sh. Likewise, ppl from down south have a tendency to interchange s/z eg.liztening instead of listening etc..Therefore; when we hire people for BPOs now, there is a list of sounds that we check a person on. Some sounds are categorized as fatal which means that the person will take a long time to overcome the FLI. When we train people in BPOs, we tell the agents now that if you say ask or aesk, the native English speaker will understand you. Therefore; the neutral accent comprises of widely accepted pronunciation which could be either American or British. The emphasis is on clear articulation of sounds. Similarly, the agents are taught the idioms and slang specific to the culture;however; the clear objective is comprehension and not usage. I still remember my first day on OJT 10yrs ago when i asked for the customer and the gatekeeper said that he is 6 feet in the hole. Guess what, my response was when will he back from there and the gatekeeper said that honey you'll have to go up there to meet him. I thought 6 feet in the hole meant he was in the basement and since there is poor connectivity in the basement so may be the person cant take the call. After the call, my trainer called me and explained that it meant the person is dead. Not many understand when the a native English speaker says "he kicked the bucket". The natural response is "hope he didn't hurt himself badly". These days the emphasis is on these nuances because it is not the accent which leads to a communication breakdown as much as lack of cultural understanding.
At the end of the day even the global customers understand and accept the fact that we cant speak like them and they are perfectly okay as long as they dont have a tough time understanding us and vice-versa.

Regards
Tina