If your business is expanding globally, by now you would realized that the need for Multilingual customer support in indisputable. Many companies, however, tend to invest in an in-house customer support department or work with freelance customer support executives. Neither strategy is utterly flawed. But, at the same time, you can’t deliver great customer support by adapting either of them.
Let’s find out why!
When You Set Up An In-House Customer Support Function
Establish your in-house multilingual call center, just like any other function, in-house is an added cost and effort. And a pretty sizeable one too. You need to assess how many multilingual customer support agents you need and for what all languages. If you target different countries and wish to provide Multilingual customer support in all those languages, you’ll have to bring in dedicated native speaking agents for each language to run multilingual customer support for each of those countries. If you don’t have sufficient customer contact volume in each of those languages, will you have sufficient work to keep your Multilingual Customer support agents busy? If not, it can be prohibitively expensive when you calculate the cost per contact you will incur to run your in-house Multilingual call center. Also, how do you manage and review their work? For instance, if you hire a German customer support agent, you’ll need a German supervisor to guide him/her. Also, how do you allocate work to these agents? How do you cover for their absence – scheduled or unscheduled? Hire extra back ups means additional cost.
Having in-house Multilingual call center means that each time you expand your business to a new geography, you will have to spend time hiring, training and managing your multilingual customer support agents for that country.
To summarise , hiring in-house multilingual customer support agents is like running your own in-house multilingual call center. Soon, you will realize that you are spending more time, energy and resources supervising your in-house multilingual call center that you should ideally be focusing on developing your business and acquiring new customers in that new country you have made your entry in.
When You Work With Freelance Multilingual Customer Support Executives
At first glance, outsourcing multilingual customer support to freelancers sounds tempting. It seems like a quick fix that costs a fraction of doing it in-house and cheaper than most of the outsourced multilingual call centers. With a few clicks, you can find many freelance native multilingual agents willing to render their services including customer support. But, working with freelancers has its own downsides.
First and foremost there is the trouble of picking the right freelancers. How do you decide which freelance customer support executive to work with? How do you compare them judiciously? Can you always trust the reviews? Reviews may not always be relevant to customer service skills of the freelancer. You’ll have to spend time assessing costs, going through reviews, and maybe even conducting background checks before getting started. That’s a lot of time, which should rather be invested in improving your products and services.
Multilingual freelancers need to be managed too, just like in-house agents and given that you need to manage them remotely, it makes the task more complicated. Making sure they stick to the schedule and are available as agreed upon, setting up training processes and programs for them before they can even start working, monitoring that they are promptly and accurately answering your customers’ questions, are following your instructions, and style is a full-time job in itself.
With freelance support agents working out of different countries, there’s always the issue of time zone differences, making coordination extremely hard. And what happens if the freelance agent decides to quit abruptly or goes on unplanned leave? You will find yourself frantically looking for a replacement to prepare for the job all over again!
While freelancers may be able to answer your basic customer queries, getting them to understand what is your brand culture is, who your customer are, what their core problems are, whether it has occurred before, and how to effectively tackle them is challenging and to quite an extent futile because multilingual freelancers are not long term.
Hiring multilingual freelancers is similar to running your own multilingual call center, just outside your premises. The perceived cost advantage seriously pales in front of all the trouble you will need take on to make something like this work. The drawbacks of using freelance support agents are quite glaring. Keep in mind that the cost of poor customer service is immeasurable, especially given how well-connected modern-day customers are.
You should channelize your energy and resources in growing your business and let a professional outsourced Multilingual call center handle your multilingual customer support.
The Need For A Comprehensive Multi-lingual Call Center Solution
An experienced outsourced multilingual call center is your answer. There’s often skepticism around how outsourced multilingual call centers are costlier than, for instance, working with freelancers. However, the comparison itself is flawed. What a Multilingual call center offers is a fully managed solution that takes the entire burden of running multiple customer support off your shoulder, something you can’t compare with hiring freelancers or an in-house solution.
Most Multilingual call centers offer customer support solution in multiple languages. For instance, here at LiveSalesman, we offer native Multilingual customer support in most European and Asian languages including Spanish Call Center Support, French Call Center Support, German Call Center Support and Italian Call Center Support. Thus, you get the advantage of one stop solution for customer support in multiple languages.
Another huge advantage is that when you work with a leading multilingual call center, the agents have a strong foundation in delivering customer support for different brands and have the right skill set for the job, thereby making it easier for you to get them up to speed.
Above all, when you deal with a professional multilingual call center, they are accountable to deliver the promised results and are bound by the SLA you sign with them. They have a full-fledged recruitment, training and operations team dedicated for different functions of running a seamless customer support operation. Most of the Multilingual Call Centers work round the clock so you get the benefit of 24×7 Multilingual customer support. You don’t need to worry about arranging back ups or replacements when agents go on leave or quit.
Oftentimes, an outsourced multilingual call center is a much cheaper option than running multilingual customer support in-house. The list of benefits is endless.
Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help you deliver high quality multilingual customer service cost effectively.
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