How can a stammer affect the management of a person’s daily life?

Some people stammer very openly, whilst others try to work around moments of stammering, perhaps finding a different way to say it or taking a run up and repeating a previous phrase as a lead-in, or saying less than they really want to. Some people go to great lengths to hide their moments of stammering whilst others revel in the way their speech makes them stand out from the crowd. Stammering is often unpredictable. And it often fluctuates so people who stammer may experience more stammering on some days than others. See this 2-minute video to get some insight into how stammering looks and sounds.

The only thing people who stammer have in common is the fact that they stammer, but the way that the stammer looks and sounds, how the person feels about that, and the responses they get from other people when they speak vary enormously. All these factors will affect how much influence stammering has on a person’s daily life. However, stammering can be physically and mentally hard work, and dealing with unhelpful or downright unkind responses from others is part of daily life for some people who stammer. Think about how it might feel to buy a bus ticket, order a coffee, try to get a GP appointment, pick up your prescription, or query a transaction on your bank account if your previous experiences have included being laughed at or hung up on when you talk.

What are the challenges faced?

Specifically, when engaging with service providers (e.g. banks/ utilities) what are some examples of the challenges someone with a stammer may have faced?

There are definitely some barriers created by standard business practices for customers and services users who stammer. Ways of working have rarely been designed with stammering in mind.

Service providers often require a customer to ID themselves in some way to access services or information. Many people who stammer find it very hard to say their name on demand. Indeed, in a recent survey of 1500 people, half of whom stammer, and half of whom don’t, 83% of respondents who stammer rated saying their name on demand as difficult or very difficult (compared with just 6% of respondents who don’t stammer). So this requirement to say your name, or your address or your account number, or anything where there’s not an alternative way to say it, can bring challenges. In these moments, customers who stammer are likely to need space and time to stammer or alternative methods of working through the ID process.

In reality, what often happens is that people who stammer are hung up on as call handlers mistake moments of stammering for ‘a bad line’ or are even mocked or laughed at for stammering on their own name.

Continuing with the topic of telephone contacts, some service providers use voice recognition programmes to get service users to the right queue or department, or to find their customer record. However, research shows that voice recognition systems typically do not handle stammered speech well. So service users can be stuck in a loop of “I’m sorry I didn’t quite catch that. Could you say that again?” and may have to experience the frustration and demoralisation of having to fail the process repeatedly before being put through to a human who can interact with someone who stammers much more effectively.

Other areas of concern are fraud procedures where speech dysfluency may be one of the ‘red flags’ used by human or automated systems to detect untruthfulness or nervousness. The problem is that if you’re someone who stammers, dysfluencies are a fundamental part of your speech pattern. It’s how you talk. So for customers who stammer, speech dysfluency is not a marker of untruthfulness or nervousness, yet such markers may still be applied to their accounts or applications.

And a final point which related to both telephone and face-to-face contacts is well-intentioned attempts to help. When someone is stammering, it’s very common for listeners to want to ‘help’, by completing the person’s word or sentences for them. The vast majority of people who stammer find this unhelpful and embarrassing, and would prefer the space to speak.

Supporting consumers with a stammer

What steps/support could service providers take to help engage with consumers with a stammer more easily and/or use their services?

So, breaking it down into four points:

• Make space for stammering. Value stammered speech. It’s how some people talk.
• If you use voice recognition procedures, make sure there is an early escape route so that people with speech differences and difficulties don’t have to slog through an exhausting and stressful obstacle course before getting put through to a real person.
• Look at your procedures around ‘bad lines’ or ‘silent calls’. Does it seem like your procedures would help people who stammer, or make it more likely that they will get hung up on. See this post about how the Money Wellness call centre addressed this and read STAMMA’s guide to Stammering and Customer Contact.
• Opt-in customer record flagging so that frontline staff know which customers might need more time to talk, or might need to go through ID processes in a slightly different way, and so that dysfluency-related fraud markers are not applied to customers who stammer.