multilingual call centre services

What Can You Do About Multilingual Call Center Services Right Now

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How to be sure your firm stays competitive by meeting all customers’ needs with multilingual contact center support.

The unceasing tides of globalization and the Internet have vastly decreased distances between cultures across the world. A Canadian government statistics report found that 17.5 percent of Canadians (nearly six million individuals) reported speaking at least two languages in their homes. While Canadians are used to functioning in a bilingual society and most Canadian firms already offer full service multilingual contact center support in both official languages, these days two languages are often not enough. If you aren’t certain that your firm offers multilingual contact center service that meets or exceeds the expectations of your diverse customer base, you may be teetering on the brink of obsolescence.

The First Steps

There are thousands of languages spoken worldwide, and even the most advanced multilingual contact center services do not offer support in every language. However, you can shrink this somewhat overwhelming problem dramatically by taking some initial first steps to figure out what languages you need to offer support in and how to be sure it’s available. Offering multilingual contact center support can make a huge impact on customer satisfaction. In fact, the International Customer Management Institute reports that more than 70 percent of multilingual consumers benefitted from truly multilingual contact center service.

Job one in ensuring that your multilingual contact center is meeting customer needs is analyzing the numbers of calls in each language and determining whether or not this volume can be handled in-house with existing staffing levels. If not, you may consider bringing in an additional employee fluent in the needed language or seeking multilingual contact center support from a third party with expertise in that language. To make the task of ensuring that you are meeting your multilingual customers’ needs effectively in a manner than won’t break your bank, you may offer full time support in Canada’s more widely spoken languages such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic. Then, you can bring in outsourced backup with expertise in languages of limited diffusion.

Important Considerations

An important caveat to consider when attempting an upgrade from a bilingual client service operation to a becoming a truly multilingual contact center is cultural competency. Sometimes linguistic competency is not enough. Cultural factors can impact customer expectations in ways you may not anticipate; for this reason it is often wise to turn over your multilingual functions to an outside firm that can truly meet the linguistic and cultural competency expectations of the modern, globalized customer base.

The Charge

You want a multilingual contact center solution that will reduce your costs without sacrificing the level of customer service you offer in any language. Sometimes managing this task in-house can be too much, especially for small- to medium-sized operations. Be sure that you have multilingual contact center support that is available 24/7 so you never let service slip because the task of adding multilingual agents overwhelmed your in-house client service center. For more information on how you can guarantee around-the-clock service to multilingual clients without breaking your budget, explore our free whitepaper, “10 Proven Strategies to Decrease the Cost of Your Customer Care Without Sacrificing Service Levels.”




Download the FREE Whitepaper: 10 Proven Strategies to Decrease the Costs of Your Customer Care Without Sacrificing Service Levels