ICMI Knowledge Center

Are You Speaking Your Customers Language?
by: Greg Rosner


Topics: Special Topics
Description: Organizations are increasingly dealing with a multilingual customer base. Is a language service provider a viable option for your contact center?




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Call center agents often find themselves interacting with limited English-speaking callers. Many centers rely on their staff’s language capabilities to bridge the communication gap, which can be especially difficult in a phone-based environment where the lack of visual cues exaggerates verbal communication barriers. This begs the question: Do the existing language capabilities of our agents reflect the language demands of our customers?
Translation services firm thebigwordGroup recently conducted a research study to see how well bank and insurance call centers in the U.K. handled callers speaking limited English. Calls were placed to 15 of Britain’s major financial services providers between January and May 2007. The calls were made to nationally advertised numbers with the aim of opening a bank account.

Calls were made by 12 researchers, each speaking a different non-English language. The researchers were all non-English speakers and residents of the U.K. Each researcher was given a script to work through. They first asked, in their own language, to speak to someone who could understand them. The researcher then rated the responses on how the call was managed.

The choice of languages was based on the most widely spoken European languages in the U.K., including: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Slovakian, Portuguese, Bengali, Turkish, Udu, Somali, Czech and Polish.

The results: Of 180 calls made, only three resulted in a solution to the language barrier and the researchers obtaining the information they required. Researchers reported that they did not receive an overall positive customer experience in 92 percent of the calls to banks. For insurers the figure was 84 percent.
This report demonstrates that the U.K.’s leading financial services companies are failing to provide sufficient customer service levels and are unable to communicate effectively with a large number of their potential customers. Some British financial services providers may be taking measures to overcome language barriers at high street branch level. However, there is still a striking lack of services available to support inquiries made by limited English speakers to bank and insurance company contact centers.

The basics of Telephone Interpreting

With the native languages of new citizens and the fact that many companies are undergoing global ex­pansion, having a robust language service in place enables contact centers to improve penetration into this new customer base.

Telephone Interpreting integrates easily within a call center environment. A customer service agent will typically follow these five simple steps:

Identify the language of the caller.
Call a dedicated free-phone number.
Dial or state the language that the caller requires.
Wait for connection to a telephone interpreter.
The agent, caller and telephone interpreter engage in a three-way conversation.

Is It Right for Your Center?

In deciding whether Telephone Interpreting is right for your call center, consider an external and internal view of language interaction:

Understand what languages your customers are speaking. Your starting point should be to realize the language requirements of your customers. Is there any fluctuation in languages spoken by your customers?
The language capabilities of your own staff. You should then understand the language capabilities of your own staff. Is your staff able to provide appropriate levels of customer service to limited English speakers?
Your final assessment may conclude that there are instances where service levels are failing and your sales, marketing and customer service strategy may not be fully aligned. In this case, telephone interpreting can be a realistic and simple solution.

Five Tips for selecting the best partner

Consider the following five points before engaging a professional languages services provider.

Telephony issues. To connect to a telephone interpreting service, your phone system generally should support teleconferencing. If yours does not have this functionality, look for vendors who can host teleconferences; however, be aware that this may affect the cost of the call.
Service levels. Look for a supplier who provides telephone interpreting in languages aligned with your customers’ language requirements. This service should be available 24x7 as an on-demand service with a dedicated number for your agents to call.
Interpreters. Make sure that all telephone interpreters are native speakers of your customers’ required languages, and understand the types of calls your business manages.
Training. Choose a supplier who offers consultancy, training, elearning and instruction guides to your specifications to ensure the service is picked up across your call center(s).
Billing. Make sure that you are only paying for the time you use the interpreter. Ideally, calls should be billed per-second so that there is no rounding-up.
The bottom line is, the concept of telephone interpreting is very simple: when communication is ob-structed by a language barrier, access to an interpreter on the telephone quickly provides a solution.