One of the consequences of globalization is the homogenization of the world, which is responsible for companies delivering the same service in locations as diverse as South Africa and New Zealand. Another is accessibility to talent, so companies in Silicon Valley can hire engineers and computer scientists from India and elsewhere. This has resulted in the influx of foreigners in the vast majority of metropolitan cities around the world giving rise to multilingual communities. According to the New York Times, as many as 800 languages are spoken in New York City, making multilingual answering services an important component for businesses looking to address the needs of a wide customer base. A new article written by Sound Telecom, a nationwide provider of answering and call center services, details how businesses can communicate with more customers by using answering services with multilingual capabilities.
The fact of the matter is the flow of cross-border traffic of information, money, people and technology is not going to stop anytime soon, and as the impact of globalization continues to increase, one of the side effects is increasing number of multilingual societies. In the United States more than 30 million people have a primary language that is not English, and according to Sound Telecom, this number is set to increase in the coming years.
The report points out organizations that are not equipped to take care of this large pool of potential customers are missing out on great opportunities. By enhancing their customer service with multilingual capabilities businesses can experience better growth, and whether they partner with a call center that can provide search services or they performed the service in-house it is a win-win situation.
According to the author of the report Andrew Tillery, Sound Telecom supports more than 220 different languages and it has accomplished this by partnering with a third party translation service. This collaboration has allowed the company to speak with callers and resolve any issues they might have, or gather the appropriate information so it can be passed on to the business.
Communicating to customers in their native-language opens up new markets for public and private organizations so they can better serve their customers. As Tillery points out, a multilingual service can only succeed by partnering with a third party translation service capable of providing a wide range of languages. Granted a company can hire hundreds of translators and answer calls by native speakers, but the vast majority of them will only receive calls occasionally as the population density for the vast majority of the languages is very small, which necessitates the use of a translation company.
With a dedicated multilingual answering service the question of what language your customers speak should no longer matter.