“You are absolutely right to be unimpressed with the standard of English and the overall presentation of the email that you received – I certainly was……… I appreciate your discretion in not publishing the name of the sender of the email; however, I would be grateful if you could forward it directly to me as the content indicates that we need to address this issue either on an individual level, or within our staff training programme. Adorama is one of the largest photographic retail and mail order suppliers in the USA, building our reputation over 30 years in the photographic field. We don’t use an agency or a call center outside the US to provide customer support; the sales team are all based in our New York office. Once again, my apologies for the email that you received; you can be assured that we will use this as a learning experience to improve the standard of training within the sales team.”

I wholly sympathize with ESL people because they’re still managing something that I can’t do (grin)–but if your job is communication, it behooves you to communicate as well as possible, or it reflects badly on you and your employer. The person at the other end of the e-mail can’t see that you’re still learning, while a face-to-face encounter would counteract that.

It’s true, though, Melissa–no answer at all would be worse! (grin)

My second thought was of a member of my family who happens to be very intelligent but has an ongoing struggle with spelling and grammar. However, this family member would never take a job that requires a lot of written communication.

My guess? Overseas outsourcing.

My verdict? I don’t think companies should hire people with a poor command over written English to engage in written communications with customers. It’s bad for business. However, there are worse things. Like no answer at all.

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I absolutely agree that this woman sounds like a non-native speaker and, if she were helping me out at a store in person, I’d be willing to make allowances, while applauding her for tackling this challenge. But that’s different. If a person is a sales person in a camera store, or working in a department where communication skills aren’t vital, then shaky English is unimportant and more power to them. But to have been hired to respond to customer emails–which is strictly a use-the-written-language skill–then I feel that the language skills are VERY important. Because that’s the main point of her job. I sympathise with the learning curve, but that shouldn’t be the kind of job that requires on-the-job training (grin).

I find myself of two minds here — or more precisely, two emotional reactions. I do feel that the company would have done better to test the English skills of its reps before turning them loose on the public. However, I have a lot of sympathy for foreigners trying to get by in English.

If I were the one receiving this customer service email, I think I’d probably come down on the side of hoping the nice non-native writer has many years ahead to improve his or her English.

Shira

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