Increase Your Brand’s Credibility by Deploying Bilingual Call Centers 

 

· Customer Services
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E-commerce is now an integral part of ourdaily lives and it is here to stay. Last year nearly 3 billion people bought goods worth 4 Trillion USD using internet websites. If you are a business operator in this field, you are already sitting on a gold mine. However, there is one very important facet of business operations in form of customer engagement, which if not done properly can have a damaging impact on your brand. The use of language plays a mission-critical role in this exercise. 70 percent of E-commerce customers around the globe prefer interacting with a brand that provides customer engagement in their mother tongue but it has been observed that almost 80 percent of brands provide this service only in native English. This is where Multilingual Customer Service comes as an advantageous dimension for customerengagement. Even if customer support is provided through Bilingual Call Centers, where the native language is an appended option withEnglish, the customer experience increases manifold.

A Multilingual Customer Service Center ensures that not only the customercomfort level is kept central to the offering, but also a strong and professional brand image is projected. The teams have to be adept and completely hands-on with product/service offerings. The use of the local native language should come naturally with due respect bestowed to cultural nuances. If the target geography has a good concentration of residents speaking a common mother tongue, Bilingual Call Centers can complete the tasks efficiently. The client feelsmore engaged with the brand when s/he hears a human voice speaking in a familiar language while addressing their queries. It leads to a sense of assuredness and purpose while completing the sales cycle.

Have you ever wondered that similar-soundingwords in different languages can mean two entirely different things? And if you are callous with your approach, the usage can have a disastrous impact on the drift of the conversation. Just look at these few examples: `Home’ in English means a place where someone lives but it means `mold’ in Finnish and `man’ in Catalan. `Panna’ is cream in Italian and English, but means `put’ in Finnish, and agonizingly `Burra’ is the term you associate with Donkey in Spanish but in Italian it means `butter’!

As a consumer-facing Internet Company, ifyour customer care center is not careful with the usage of proper language, the above examples clearly illustrate what kind of damaging impact it can have. If
you are using them in day-to-day conversation and are not very careful about the nationality of the subject, you may end up concocting statements that might get considered rude to downright offensive.

As discussed above, E-commerce is here tostay. From a student who is looking for a good quality laptop to aid with online classes, a lady fulfilling the monthly ration requirement of her family, a young jet-setting couple embarking on a trip to their dream destination, or a grandmother looking for a pair of eyeglasses, everyone is jumping on the internet bandwagon to find the best of deals. Critics had panned this rising phenomenon as a passing fade just a few years ago but the onslaught of Corona has now bolstered e-commerce as a major tool for shopping. When strict travel restrictions and social distancing became the norm of the day, people realized the true potential of this medium. Not only do you end up getting the best of deals but multiple online payment options and doorstep delivery saves you many
a headache. Some of these brands have no questions asked return policy as well so customers do even feel the agony of accepting goods that they bought impulsively or feel that delivered product quality was inferior.

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An E-commerce entrepreneur considers customer engagement and customer experience as two strong pillars on which the business operates. We looked into all the virtues which one associates with shopping over an internet medium but there is a severe lacuna as well. The entire experience is devoid of human touch. Just consider this: A customer browses through the catalog displayed on the website, chooses the payment options, ratifies the time of delivery, and finally gets the package delivered to the doorstep. The good old `feeling’ of a shopping spree is not associated with e-commerce buying. The only stage when the customer gets to interact with a human is when s/he decides to ping a message or call up the customer support center of the brand. If the e-commerce brand utilizes this opportunity
judiciously, it will have loyal clients vouching for an enthralling customer experience.

It is noteworthy that brands do understand the significance of setting up a good customer support center. None of the international brands are found wanting in this respect. The challenge really comes with the language in use at the call center. Mostly it is unidimensional and English is the common language being used across these centers globally. The common logic behind this step is that since English happens to lingua franca for trade, most of the customers will quite comfortable using it. The brands are committing a strategic folly here, and that too quite a serious one. Recently International Customer Management Institute conducted a global survey of E-commerce customers and got the startling realization that 80 percent of customers do not prefer the use of English over their mother tongue while
engaging with the customer care center of a brand. The same institute then connected with numerous e-commerce brands to realize that 70 percent of them do not provide Multilingual Customer Care support.

Setting up Captive Multilingual Customer Care Support or Bilingual Call Centers can be cost-wise prohibitive for a brand but there arethird-party outsourced service providers like LiveSalesman who provide remote facilities for such services at a fraction of the cost.