Home

 

As brands strive to deliver the best customer experience (CX), companies are increasingly looking to enable positive interactions at every touch point. Consumers rely on contact centers to resolve issues, answer questions and ultimately help with the sales and support process in any number of industries from retail to healthcare. It is critical that during these interactions, contact centers provide the personalization and service that consumers are looking for.

 

Part of CX is acknowledging that customers are in the driver’s seat of communication. They want to connect with organizations using their preferred channels and languages. However, these goals are not always easy for contact centers to respond to. A recent survey from ICMI indicated that 86 percent of companies have non-English speaking and limited English proficiency customers, but only 66 percent are able to support them with any level of multilingual customer care.

 

This article explores why more and more brands are striving to evolve their limited language and channel offerings. Providing omni-lingual support across all channels will increase CX and reduce customer effort while lowering costs of service.

 

 

Contact centers have historically had difficulty incorporating multilingual support for a number of reasons.

 

·         In the case of hiring agents, this language talent can be difficult to attract and retain, especially when staffing across languages and time-zones. In addition, low call volumes can make it difficult to justify staffing costs while smaller queues create higher variation in agent availability and service levels.

 

·         When brands take the significant step of establishing new contact centers to deliver language support, expenses jump significantly – putting even more pressure on the justification of supporting those languages.

 

·         Brands managing languages across disparate contact center locations find that compliance and quality control and assurance become more important.

 

Multichannel and omni-channel compound the issue primarily because these are most often delivered in only primary languages. Acknowledging that multilingual is hard, omni-lingual and omni-channel is harder. Nonetheless, contact centers looking to enhance CX for its consumers must address these language and channel challenges to be successful.

 

 

 

 

 

The following trends, overlaid against the initial language and omni-channel challenges, are forcing contact centers to evolve their multilingual strategies.

 

1.       Multi/Omni-channel – Putting a finer point on omni-channel, voice has given way to interacting across multiple channels during a single journey. Regardless of which channels consumers engage in, they expect their information to be shared so that context isn’t lost and their time isn’t wasted. Supporting voice or using an over-the-phone interpretation service only is no longer an acceptable strategy. 

2.       Self-service – Customers, especially millennials, expect self-service. This is requiring brands to, if they haven’t already, provide more and better website, forum/community and mobile support. These self-service channels need to be enabled with omni-lingual capabilities to provide the most benefit. If the majority of posts are in a primary language, the channel isn’t helping any non-primary speakers find the answers they are looking for.

3.       Expectations for 24/7 support – Customers expect 24/7 support, including the ability to connect through social media, regardless of time of day or day of week. 

4.       Unified platform adoption – Contact centers often depend on a variety of communication platforms. These typically don’t provide broad language support especially as it relates to localization of the agent desktop, which puts brands at a language management disadvantage when it comes to supporting mono-lingual agents.

5.       Near/Off Shoring – Near- and off-shoring are running trends for contact centers. From a language standpoint, it’s important to note that these don’t necessarily result in an optimal multilingual strategy. Supporting languages in some of the common outsourced areas is very difficult as local agents simply don’t speak particular languages.

6.       Journey Streamlining – To better understand customer interactions and reduce customer effort, contact centers are looking at journey maps. Because these are typically done in primary languages, progressive companies are extending this planning and measurement to non-primary languages.  

7.       Globalization – As the world becomes increasingly connected, the distinction between domestic and global is shrinking. Fast growth companies understand this and are managing their contact centers accordingly.

8.       IoT/M2M – As the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine2Machine (M2M) become more common, the volume of related contact center interactions is climbing. While it’s difficult to predict what devices, channels and platforms IoT and M2M will affect, contact centers need to be prepared for proactive outreach across all languages.

 

These trends in the contact center marketplace are being driven primarily by rising customer expectations. Conversely, this creates more opportunities than ever for brands to capitalize on the increased engagement.

 

That, in turn, is increasingly transforming multilingual support from a benefit to a requirement. Organizations have options in how they respond – from second-generation real-time translation solutions and hiring agents, to back-office resources and business process outsourcers. The good news is contact centers are in a great position to provide the multichannel and omni-lingual experiences that consumers expect.  

 

###

 

Tom Tseki is a contact center industry veteran. His experience and expertise include helping organizations implement and leverage omni-channel customer care strategies to improve CX, increase revenue and gain contact center efficiencies.

 

He has a deep background in contact center technology as it relates to customer communication, analytics and workforce optimization. Tom works closely with contact center and BPO leaders on strategies to improve care by reducing customer effort – leading to increased CSAT and NPS.