Multilingual Call Centers are Aiding Brand Engagement and Customer Loyalty

Summary - Brands in the services sector like Hospitality or Spa/Salon, rely upon good quality human interaction with their clients to increase footfalls and enhance customer experience. There is an increased usage of Bilingual Call Centers and Multilingual Call Centers by brands to achieve these twin objectives. Companies are even using 24/7 outsourced reservation support for the hotel industry and Spa and Salon appointment scheduling services for the beauty industry to penetrate deeper and earn client confidence in their service delivery.

 

Even though service sector industries like hospitality and beauty realize the importance of engaging customers in a more human manner, they are still coming short in finding effective measures of achieving the objectives. They are failing to assess the importance of engaging the customers in their mother tongue. One simple mechanism to achieve this goal is to engage a multilingual call center or a bilingual call center for 24/7 outsourced reservation support as far as the hospitality industry is concerned. The same can be done for the beauty industry by engaging Spa and Salon appointment scheduling services. Once these measures are adopted your brand will see a quantifiable impact as far as customer engagement is concerned.

Just a year ago, when the pandemic called Corona hit the world, the Hospitality and Beauty industries globally came to a screeching halt. There was a devastating impact on customer footfalls and whatever trickle was still left, remained underserved due to staff paucity. Even today you feel the effect the tight lockdown conditions and the resultant social distancing measures had on the smooth running of enterprises. Small business owners of Hotels, Spas, and Salons have been on their wit’s end to figure out the `new normal’ of conducting business. How do you remain afloat amidst these constricting circumstances? These were the times when some of them experimented with 24/7 outsourced reservation support, which gave the customer access to the front desk any hour of the day, and location or office timing didn’t remain a bottleneck.

Many of them have taken various other measures of course corrections as well. These included the introduction of automation up to a degree for legacy business practices like front desk operations.  For any hotel, spa, or salon front desks traditionally have been the first layer of interaction for a walk-in prospect or a regular patron. The ensuing conversations have been signals for a client to form impressions regarding the expected service levels. From the introduction to quality and range of services on offer, up-selling and cross-selling of products and services, ensuring buy-ins for ongoing marketing schemes, making reservations, or scheduling appointments, have been the forte of a good service front desk. A good desk is instrumental in the smooth running of the entire enterprise whereas a great one is necessary for achieving exponential growth in the business. 24/7 outsourced reservation support achieved these objectives to the hilt.

One more measure being adopted in these challenging times of staff paucity by small and medium business enterprises in hotels, spas, and salons across the world is to segregate `service communication’ and `service delivery’. When it came to service communication, apart from deploying bilingual call centers and multilingual call centers, automated chatbots started getting introduced. Automated chatbots are simple software programs that can select answers from a predefined response bucket.

While for service delivery trained in-house domain experts are mandatory, `service communication’ can be optimized for both cost and efficiency. In conjunction with multilingual call centers, there is increasing use of chat-bots and outsourced call center services providing live chat support to deliver superlative performances on this front. Let’s deep dive into both these variants and look at their merits and challenges.

Chatbots are essentially computer programs that are designed to simulate conversations with humans. They function effectively over a user interface like a customer’s website or an app. They follow a certain set of `what-if’ and `if-this-then-that’ instructions built into the program using business logic. There is a range of highly developed chatbots also. These advanced chatbots can also utilize cutting-edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence (where the spectrum of responses can increase significantly utilizing multiple data points) and Machine Learning (where the program can essentially keep teaching itself, based on past experiences without any human intervention). When deployed over a 24/7 outsourced reservation support or Spa and Salon appointment scheduling services, they are known to give better results than normal.

Chatbots are not a new concept. When you look at history you will find that the hospitality industry began experimenting with chatbots about a decade ago when Facebook’s messenger service took the world by storm and allowed images and emojis as well as call-to-action within the chat window. Radisson Blue Edwardian came up with a chatbot called “Edward” in 2015. The bot helped the guests throughout their stay through consistent messaging and also lent a helping hand at the time of check-out.

As mentioned earlier, when used in conjunction with 24/7 outsourced reservation support or Spa and Salon appointment scheduling services Chat-bots have showcased many positives which include providing guests 24/7 real-time and on-demand customized information, reminders, recommendations, suggestions, and solutions starting from check-in to check-out. They are also utilized for cross-selling and up-selling additional goods and services.

There are limitations to chatbots as well. When it comes to providing a meaningful response to even ordinary human queries, chatbots more often than not showcase their inability to perform beyond fed instructions.

Utmost personalization is what clients always look for when it comes to the service industry. Customers need to feel special and when the personalization of services is delivered through technology having human touch at its core, the results can be very satisfying. Out-sourced live chat is a medium that allows hotel guests to communicate with support agents or service representatives in real time. The American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) has found more than 60 percent of customers expressed their belief that live chats with human support staff are far more satisfying than interacting with a bot while addressing a query. These needs can be addressed through bilingual call centers or multilingual call centers.

Live-chat support provides all the benefits covered under chat-bots and also has some other very specific advantages as well. There is always this personal touch in all communication. Live chats can lend a personality to the hotel’s or Spa/Salon’s online presence and offer the same experience as the offline one. The Live chat team is also the hotel’s first line of defense as they engage customers instantaneously, answer specific questions, and are able to reduce escalations and negative reviews. If this is left to a chatbot, you have a disaster in making.