Your company strives to provide great customer service. But are you able to serve every customer interested in your products and services? A recent article by Deeksha Dadu emphasizes a crucial requirement for every company: the ability to provide multilingual customer service.
Technology has caused the world to get infinitely smaller over the last 20 years. Regardless of your physical address, people from different cultures and locations will find your company if they have a need for your product or service. It’s great that we’re so connected, but many companies could face some serious barriers to providing service. To learn more about these barriers, read the original article here.
How many languages do you speak? More importantly, how many languages do your customer service agents speak? If your language fluency starts and ends with English, you’re not alone. Some estimates report that fewer than 20% of Americans are bilingual. This doesn’t have typically have a major impact on day-to-day life, but it could have negative consequences for businesses.
When a customer is looking for a product, they’ll likely start by searching on Google, Bing, or another search engine. Assuming you sell relevant products and are competitive in the search results via SEO and PPC, this high-intent customer will visit your website. Why is this relevant? Because these searches happen in any part of the world. We’re no longer in an era where your customers are almost exclusively from your neighborhood – any store can have a global reach as long as they have a website. If you look at your website’s demographic data, there’s a good chance your visitors are coming from numerous states and countries.
To stay relevant in a global marketplace, you’ll need to open your mind to the idea of serving customers on a worldwide scale, even as a small business. However, hiring multilingual agents for your in-house customer service team isn’t always a practical option. Finding the right candidate might be a challenge, and your company simply might not have the budget to add a new agent.
If you’re thinking globally about your company, you should consider working with a nearshore or offshore contact center partner. We’re not talking about replacing your current team. We mean hiring an outsourced team as a complement to your existing staff. This strategy can provide multilingual support at half the cost of hiring new in-house agents. We have clients who have done this and been extremely satisfied with the results. They treat their outsourced contact center partner like an extension of their business and include their agents in their company contests and gamification events.
Need a multilingual contact center to provide your customer service? We can help!
Outsource Consultants are call center experts with over 25 years of outsourcing industry experience who have spent thousands of hours vetting and analyzing the strengths and specializations of the industry-leading outsource call center vendors. If you’re considering call center outsourcing, simply call 888-766-4482 or request a free call center cost proposal today and we’ll help you find the solution that best fits your exact requirements.
