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Sapphire Now + 2012 ASUG Conference
May 14-16, 2012; Orange County Convention Center, ORLANDO, Florida (USA)
Catch Minacs’ CIO Arvind Sood as he shares practical tips and tools to translate business intelligence into real business results, at the world’s largest SAP conference on Tuesday, May 15 at 11:00 am. Arvind will speak on the topic "Making Business Intelligence More Intelligent: Insider Tips and Techniques”.
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BPO India Forum 2012
May 11, 2012; The Westin, MUMBAI, (India)
Catch Milind Godbole share his views at the inaugural CEO Panel discussion on "Driving non-linear growth - do we have a business model?", at the fourth edition of the BPO India Forum in Bangalore.
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Blog: Customer Relationship Management

Use Multilingual Services to Captivate Your Customer

Yes Cancel
Author: Sachin Karnik | Vice President of Operations at Aditya Birla Minacs

Harnessing LANGUAGE SKILLS FOR CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

In the current global macroeconomic scenario, advanced markets are experiencing rapid contractions and are looking to harness opportunities in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil, etc. Moreover, enterprises that have already set base in these growth markets are further expanding into rural areas and small towns that are slowly but surely walking the path of globalization. In this context, multilingual skills are increasingly assuming a growing role in driving customer engagement and satisfaction.
Your customer’s experience is enhanced when a service is provided to her in the language of her choice. Or better still, if the conversation is in the local dialect that she is comfortable in. The comfort of being able to express her preferences and aversions helps gratify her need.
There is increasing evidence that the ability to provide multilingual customer services is now serving as a winning differentiator for leading players targeting new markets. Have you been speaking to your outsourced customer service provider to step up and meet this critical success factor for entering and succeeding in new markets?

BALANCING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE WITH EFFICIENCY

Enlarging customer services to multiple regional languages must be looked at with caution, though. This is because business process outsourcing (BPO) providers, especially contact centers are often caught between the need to balance excellent customer relationship management with the achievement of service metrics like AHT (average handling time), abandonment rates and dropped calls.
Finding this balance is tricky because it is difficult to manage customer experience against the demands of the harsher, regimented, metrics-driven productivity and cost efficiency mandates of a contact center. Here, standardization is pursued to provide efficiencies, but delivering a great customer experience requires as much customization as can be reasonably “built in” to the process.
An integrated and balanced approach to introducing multilingual services is therefore necessary. In fact, look at service delivery right from advisor recruitment to the management of arriving call patterns and staff deployment. The objective is not to sacrifice standardization, but to maximize the probability that your customer is attended to by an advisor who speaks her language.

HOW WE BUILT MULTILINGUAL SKILLS FOR A CLIENT

We recently developed a program to specifically ensure the seamlessness that I spoke of above. We defined and approached the new advisor on-boarding cycle as follows:
  • Recruitment design
  • Candidate testing
  • Selection
  • Training
  • Deployment
Upfront, as part of the recruitment design, we designed an objective test called “Latitude” to analyze the language proficiency right at the walk-in level. For this multilingual program, we test candidates to uncover certain key abilities like their aptitude in reading, processing input and delivering acceptable responses to all queries directed at them in a given language. We use a standardized objective scorecard to record and evaluate the responses.
Our recruitment team then decides the candidate’s suitability for hiring. After selection, on-boarding next involves training. Our trainers receive important inputs from the test scorecard. They then plan strategies to address a candidate’s specific problem areas and provide the necessary guidance.
Now the advisors are ready to move to the floor. The workforce management team too receives the advisors’ language proficiency scores. These serve as base input to roster preparation factoring in language skills to meet projected call arrival patterns. The objective is to ensure optimized language/dialect staffing of the contact center at all times to avoid runaway AHT’s, abandoned calls or dropped call situations.

MULTILINGUAL SERVICE IMPACTS SALES GROWTH & CUSTOMER RETENTION

Multilingual service contact centers help you add more qualitative shades to your customers’ experiences with your product or service. Your advisors ability to establish quicker familiarity via easier communication helps your customers shed inhibitions and avoid misunderstandings. This jumps up the quality of consumer feedback, and provides you with deeper knowledge.
Obviously, better understanding of customer behaviors, helps you make better marketing, sales and customer service decisions. This in turn improves your ability to exceed your customers’ expectations.In stagnant markets multilingual services help to retain customers. In growth markets, being able to “micro target”  your niche demographic profiles helps you win business from a larger audience.
Categories: Customer Care

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