Multilingual Call Centers: Your Business needs it now

In this globalized flat world, language cannot and should not be a barrier to trade. As a business owner, you want to serve your customers in whatever language or channel you see fit for the occasion. If your business is not limited by geography, how can it be limited by language or time zone?

If you happened to come across this article, you must be one of those who did the math and realized that your business is in for a huge boost if you start catering to the 6.5 billion people around the world who don't speak English.

If you're a consumer-facing business, you either already run a successful Customer Service Center or you've hired an Outsourced Call Center service provider. Although English remains the dominant language of communication in most call centers, it should be noted that English is not the primary language for customers from many countries. If you do business in Spain, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, etc., it makes sense to deploy customer care managers on your team who speak the mother tongue along with English. Most multinational companies opt for bilingual call centers or multilingual call centers to reach a wider audience.

It is a fact that in order to gain brand credibility among international audiences, companies are moving towards multilingual call centers. When a customer who speaks another language starts using your product or services, they want to communicate with you in the language of their choice. Statistically speaking, 74% of customers are likely to buy from a business that offers customer service in their native language.

Yes, there is an argument that translation tools available over the internet can do the job. However, the short-sightedness of such an approach must be taken into account. Customer care communication must be an exercise that gives the patron a sense of total inclusiveness. If it's messed up by using less advanced tools, your brand will come across as untrustworthy and very passive. To make a dent in the global market and gain an end-to-end advantage, multilingual customer service needs to be an integration rather than an extension of your offering.

To gain clarity on the topic, let's take the example of Spain as a business geography and the Hispanic community as a demographic. This mammoth $1.3 trillion market loves to interact with customer care only in Spanish or its various dialects. Even as the e-commerce market is booming here, so is the rate of deal cancellations. Building customer trust and loyalty is among the main business challenges cited by brands operating in the region. However, companies that have opted for Spanish call centers with native speakers have seen unprecedented success. They have seen significant increases in customer retention and repeat business.

Spanish call centers have helped businesses expand their cross-border business as more and more customers feel comfortable making payment transactions or providing personal information to native Spanish speakers.

Bilingual Call Centers or multilingual call centers are adept at breaking the language barrier in support functions. Even in a normal case, customer support is a complex process. When a misunderstanding of the spoken language is added to the issue, the resulting complexity can be overwhelming. When language is not a barrier, the result is often a great customer experience. Multilingual customer service allows you to offer native language support through trained executives, chatbots and a self-service knowledge base. The emotional connection and customer satisfaction you create when you interact with customers in their native language is very high. The client will not notice that you made a special effort to establish a connection in their native language and you are rewarded with a very high level of customer satisfaction!

Multilingual call centers have a direct impact on expanding your global reach. To increase your brand awareness and sales, you need to have target audience demographic research, search engine rankings, influencer marketing and, of course, a Multilingual Customer Service. The language gap is a key challenge when expanding worldwide, and the Multilingual Service Center does a good job of filling the gaps.

There are external call center service providers with an international reputation, such as LiveSalesman, who offer services in more than 30 world languages. Unlike the prevailing competition that provides services based on a cloud model, LiveSalesman has its own offices located around the world that attract the best talent. Call Center Service representatives are all native speakers from their respective geographic areas. Not only do they speak the local language, but they converse using proper colloquialisms to ensure the central brand message is delivered seamlessly. By understanding local cultural nuances, your customers will always feel at home when they pick up the phone or go live chat.