If there’s one industry where how you treat customers matters the most, it is the Hospitality sector. The service and experience you offer not only determines if the customer is going to stay loyal to your brand but also your brand reputation on social media and countless review sites.
Given the influx of guests from various different cultural and geographical backgrounds, the prerequisite for hotels is to offer a multilingual customer support solution.
But why exactly is this important? Why can’t you hotels just use a translator instead of a multilingual call center for multilingual customer support? How does it make customers’ life easier? Let’s find out!
1. Guests prefer to be attended to in their native language
80% of customers want to be served in their own language. And 72% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when the information is available and presented to them in their native language. So, installing a multilingual call center gives customers from different nationalities a comfort factor when engaging with your hotel. It’s easier for them to submit queries, ask questions, interact about available dates, enquire other hospitality services, etc. when the hotel provides multilingual customer support.
Moreover, when you have multilingual customer support in place, it becomes easier to understand different guest needs and expectations clearly.
2. Staying sensitive to various cultures
One thing about customer service in the hospitality sector is that you really need to make sure every interaction is warm and pleasant. And without the expertise of multilingual call center agents, it becomes quite hard to factor in the various cultural sensitivities while engaging with customers. Machine translations don’t account for cultural sensitivities like multilingual call center agents can.
Not respecting or acting in accordance with these different practices could easily result in the customer getting frustrated and developing a feeling that your hotel doesn’t care about his/her experience. Multilingual customer support helps hotels craft an environment where guests feel at home away from home.
3. Being available for the customer 24*7
If you’re offering customer support in just one language, instead of Multilingual call centre then chances are that your call center is functioning only during specific hours in a day (based on the country where you are offering support). But, that’s something which puts customers off. In this day and age, customers want you to be available 24*7. There are no two ways about it.
Having a multilingual call center ensures that you are able to support customers from different time zones, whenever they need to get in touch with you. Your existing call center agents needn’t stay up and work long hours. Rather you’d have dedicated multilingual customer support agents from different countries working defined shifts.
4. Understanding the context behind guest issues is much easier
In comparison to other industries, the hospitality sector is all about the experience. When the customer is interacting with your support staff about an issue, every minute detail matters. But when you don’t have multilingual call center agents, the chances of something getting lost in translation are quite high.
On the other hand, a multilingual customer support solution that offers well-trained multilingual call center agents who are able to piece all the information together in the right way, understand expectations better and accordingly offer quick and effective solutions. Has the guest faced a similar issue before? Or is the first time? Was it resolved last time and is it a recurring issue? A multilingual customer support agent will be able to derive context around issues a lot faster!
5. Increase in the number of bookings
The biggest advantage of multilingual customer support in the hospitality space is more bookings. Many people start the search for a service in the hospitality sector with an online search. These potential customers can be from any part of the world and it is not necessary that they know English or are comfortable speaking in English. Before they make a reservation, they may have some questions and they may call hotel reservations to seek answers to them. How the call is answered determines the impression the potential guest forms towards a hotel and influences their decision to make a reservation with a hotel or not. Naturally, when they speak with someone who is able to communicate with them in their own language, they are able to explain their requirements a lot better and the experience is much better. A hotel whose customer service is entrusted a reputable multilingual call centre is likely to win more guests than its competitors. That’s because a multilingual center caters to the needs of guests that speak English as their first and second language as well as non-English speakers.
And it’s not merely one-time bookings. When you start offering Multilingual customer support, guests start trusting you more and there’s a chance to build a strong, long-term relationship with your brand.
In fact, according to a 2014 study by ICMI, 58,4% of customers said support in their native language increased their loyalty to the brand.
Multilingual customer support also gets more guests to notice your brand. Based on the International Customer Management Institute’s research, 70% of the customers gave positive feedbacks to firms offering Multilingual Customer Services. Now, imagine what happens when your guests start sharing feedback on third-party booking sites!
There’s no dearth of competition in the hospitality space. A few bad customer reviews on third-party sites can have a sizeable negative impact on your brand image. Which is why it’s important to delight every customer, and consistently exceed changing customer expectations. Investing in a multilingual call center solution presents a foolproof way to go about doing this – no matter who the customer is, where they are coming from, and what their specific expectations are, you can serve them in their own language and make them more comfortable.
Having said this, it is understandable that not all hotels, especially the small ones, can afford to hire multilingual customer support agents in-house. That is also because most of the time the volume of customer support interaction in each language is not enough to keep that language agent engaged at all times and that’s why the cost per call is prohibitively high. A cost-effective solution is to find an outsourced multilingual call centre. At LiveSalesman, we offer specialised multilingual call center solutions for the hospitality sector including 24×7 multilingual reservations call centre and multilingual live chat help. Whether you are looking for a French Call Centre, German Call Centre, Arabic Call Centre, Chinese Call Centre, Spanish call Centre or Italian Call Centre, we offer support in over 30 European and Asian languages.
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