Many modern products or services require a multilingual customer service strategy. In the US we generally think of just English and Spanish being supported by contact centers, but consider all those US companies that are exporting to Europe, Asia, or beyond. They need to build a clear and consistent service strategy that works equally well across all the languages used by their customers.
Traditionally this has been difficult for some contact centers. One of the big problems with physical contact centers is that you can recruit only those people that live within commuting distance of the office. A multilingual contact center handling Spanish and English-speaking customers could be located in Texas or Arizona perhaps, but what if you are also exporting to Japan and Brazil?
There might be some Japanese speakers near your office in Phoenix, but do they want to work in your contact center and do they have the appropriate skills anyway? Just because they have the required language skills doesn’t mean that they are appropriate for customer support. Multilingual support gets difficult when you start moving beyond just a couple of languages.
Many European companies handle this problem by building multilingual hubs. They build a contact center near a beautiful beach in Greece or Portugal and then attract people from all across the continent to move there. So you will literally see young people from Germany and Norway move to Greece because they want to enjoy the local lifestyle. They support customers in their home country from their new home.
This works to a certain extent, but I can think of an even better solution. What if you can just hire anyone from anywhere?
By utilizing a GigCX approach your agents are all based at home. They can be anywhere, so the problem of recruiting near to an office is gone. You can seek the best possible people who love your brand and want to support your customers – and they can be truly close to your customers.
You can also find people with particular skills, such as Japanese speakers in the US who enjoy gaming. The ability to just cast the net far and wide means that these searches are possible, allowing you to build up a diverse range of skills in your customer service team – including support for multiple languages.
You could hire Japanese speakers based in Japan, or you could search for these skills inside the US – that might be a good strategy for reducing your foreign exchange risk when paying these team members. If FX is less of a concern then you can confidently just recruit from anywhere, building a team that has a focus on serving your customers in the language they prefer.
GigCX offers unprecedented flexibility. The focus of this flexibility has often been on the improved efficiency of the customer service team. You only pay for interactions with customers, not idle time, but the flexibility that allows customer service strategies to be built around multilingual support is equally as important.
You can service your customers in their local language and retain central control over who is on your team and where they are located. GigCX unlocks all these possibilities and is a lot easier than a strategy requiring hundreds (or more) of people to relocate to a new country.