Did you know more than 350 languages are spoken in the U.S. and nearly a quarter of the American population primarily speaks a language other than English at home?
If you want your multilingual outbound call center to contribute to your business objectives in very real ways—lead generation, personalized and proactive customer support, and customer feedback through satisfaction surveys—you need to ensure a great customer experience for your limited English proficiency (LEP) customers and to make the most of your agents’ efforts.
Here are four tools to consider that can help improve your LEP customer experience at your multilingual outbound call center.
1. Skill-Based Call Routing
Traditionally, outbound contact center agents need professional interpreters on an as-needed basis, which is time-consuming and inefficient. Instead, skill-based call routing—connecting customers to agents with the most relevant skills for handling their needs—connects professional linguists with consecutive callers who speak the same language. Agent skills are typically defined as proficiency in a specific language or knowledge of a product or industry.
Healthcare providers, for example, can quickly answer questions about forms, claims, coverage, and prescriptions. For LEP patients and their families, talking to someone who speaks their language can improve their health outcomes overall because they have a deeper understanding of their condition, after-care instructions, and medications.
Additional benefits include leaving in-language voicemail so recipients hear clear messages they can respond to, if necessary. Contact center associates can also place more calls in a shorter amount of time because of decreased call handling time.
More importantly, outbound best practices reduce inbound calls for service. Proactively contacting customers in their native language to solve pain points before they become a problem strengthens relationships across industries beyond healthcare. For example, in the government industry, it can make a real impact by increasing the trust between government agencies and the LEP population.
2. Latest Technology
Nearly 75 percent of customers would rather conduct online business in their native language. An even higher percentage of call centers, 80 percent by some estimates, serve customers who don’t speak the native language.
Investing in the most current technology—software and equipment, in particular— can help improve the LEP customer experience in a number of ways such as stronger connections and clearer calls, faster interpreter connection times, lower percentage of abandoned calls and reduced queue wait times. This will improve customer satisfaction and affirm their decision to do business with you. Agents can also qualify leads more efficiently when they have the tools for targeted conversations.
Digital communication channels such as websites, payment portals, and live chats available in the most common languages spoken by your customers improve their interactions with your business. When outbound agents do reach a customer after they’ve engaged with a digital channel, a pleasant online experience could mean the difference between a positive review and a negative one.
3. Comprehensive Quality Assurance
Measuring the effectiveness of a multilingual outbound call center is key to understanding which methodologies work and which ones don’t, especially in crafting exceptional customer experiences. Tracking the number of calls agents make during their shift, as well as the duration of calls that require over-the-phone interpretation, are two metrics that help management more accurately forecast staffing needs.
To gauge individual agent performance, customer feedback obtained through after-call surveys will indicate how quality assurance teams should utilize targeted listening at the agent level for specific types of calls, or according to business needs. For example, sampling both live and recorded calls and analyzing the transcripts of longer calls will highlight:
- Agents who shine consistently by not ending calls before ensuring customer questions are answered in their entirety
- Agents who need coaching to get them up to speed
- Where breakdowns elsewhere in the system have negatively impacted the customer experience
Professional interpreters play a key role in these interactions and contribute to consistently improving the efficiency of a multilingual outbound call center.
4. A Language Solutions Partner
Maintaining on-staff interpreters who can meet the needs of your current and prospective customers is neither cost effective nor efficient. Instead, you can choose a language solutions partner with decades of experience and a network of 10,000 talented professional linguists.
ULG can take this off your hands and provide OPI solutions for your multilingual outbound call center. Reach out to one of our language access experts to talk about how we can help you reach your business goals.
