Spanish Call Centers: How To Pick The Right Multilingual Call Center Partner
Finding the right Spanish call center to provide multilingual customer service for your organization is not easy.
Not only do you have the regular quality standards to evaluate, but you also need to understand the linguistic and cultural competence of the team. With so many Spanish call centers available, how do you ensure you pick the right one?
The decision matters more than you might imagine. Take a look at the data:
- 68% of consumers would switch brands if another brand offered support in their native language.
- 56% of consumers said finding information in their own language is more important than price when it comes to purchasing decisions.
- 42% of consumers said “they never purchase products and services in other languages.”
With customer loyalty, purchasing decisions and profitability on the line, finding the right multilingual call center partner is essential to ensure you get the benefits from your investment. Here are four key areas to evaluate before signing the dotted line.
Assessing the Language Proficiency and Cultural Compatibility
Most importantly, the linguistic proficiency and cultural compatibility of your provider’s agents must be top-notch.
A lack of fluency quickly creates linguistic pitfalls that undermine your investment: if agents are not proficient in their working languages, it creates misunderstandings among customers who speak with them. The more misunderstandings that occur, the less effective your service becomes, and the less satisfied customers will be. Once miscommunications become the norm, customer service breaks down quickly, with customers feeling unsupported and lacking trust in your brand.
As such, you need to evaluate linguistic competence and fluency of your potential team right away. Additionally, cultural competence is just as important for building trust and affection for your brand. While agents who are completely fluent may be able to have a conversation, they may not be as familiar with idioms, cultural references, and subtext in a conversation that someone familiar with your audience’s culture would be.
To assess linguistic and cultural fluency, you might consider:
- proctoring proficiency tests or interviews for potential agents or agencies
- role-playing common customer scenarios to gauge agent understanding and fluency
- providing cultural assessments including idioms, common phrases, and other cultural references that would be necessary for agents to know
Although some of this can be trained, starting with a good command of the target language among agents is a must when aiming to scale up services quickly.
Expertise and Experience in Spanish Call Center Services
Secondly, aside from linguistic expertise, your Spanish call center provider should have proven expertise in these three areas:
- expertise and experience in operating and managing multilingual call center services
- expertise with customer experience and customer service techniques
- experience with your industry and audience segments
Speaking Spanish is a baseline requirement, of course. But the right call center partner will have additional expertise in customer service, customer experience and your industry. For example, at ROI CX Solutions, we have decades of experience getting proven results in customer service and experience and providing exceptional multilingual call center services. We’ve also worked with a wide variety of industries, from Retail to Education, Insurance to Medical and more.
When evaluating your potential providers, look for testimonials, reviews from current or past clients, certifications, case studies or other evidence that your provider has the necessary expertise, and can provide results for your business. If you can’t find any evidence, ask for it! And if your provider can’t offer any results or data, look for someone who can.
Technological Capabilities and Infrastructure
Following linguistic capabilities and general expertise, evaluate the technological capabilities and infrastructure available with your potential multilingual call center providers.
At the very least, your provider should have the technology necessary to not only provide exceptional modern service and a streamlined experience for customers, but their tech stack should be able to integrate fully with yours. Without integrated technology, customer effort will be increased for those customers seeking multilingual services, thereby lowering satisfaction and negating the whole purpose of offering Spanish call center services.
Additionally, there’s a significant number of modern advanced technologies for enhancing your Spanish call center. For example, call centers might have access to:
- automatic translation technology
- interpretation technology
- AI translation and generation capabilities
- real-time language translation and support
While these technologies may not be essential for your needs and goals, keep in mind that integrating advanced technology will not only improve the effectiveness of your service, but will also improve productivity and efficiency among your multilingual agents. In addition, call centers who do not offer more advanced technological capabilities may not be as up-to-date with other best practices and may not be as focused on improving and implementing new technology in the future.
If this is to be a long-term partnership for your brand, it’s worth evaluating whether or not a potential partner will continue to offer best-in-class services and technological advancement for years to come.
Cost-Effectiveness and Flexibility of Spanish Call Centers
Finally, it goes almost without saying that you should be evaluating both the cost-effectiveness and the flexibility of your potential provider before signing any contracts.
According to a recent survey, 82% of companies don’t offer multilingual support because they can’t “justify the investment.” However, outsourcing your multilingual support can significantly reduce the expense involved, while still providing high-quality results. As such, any potential Spanish call center partner should be affordable compared to having agents in-house—and in general, this is typically true.
Consider all of the costs and expenses that come along with maintaining an in-house call center vs. outsourcing:
| In-House Spanish Call Center | Outsourced Spanish Call Center |
|---|---|
| higher agent salaries | flat-rate fee, typically calculated per-agent, per-hour |
| agent benefits, PTO, etc. | |
| overhead costs such as desk space and office expenses | |
| technology and software fees | |
| equipment and software licensing for each agent | |
| hiring, recruitment and training costs and resources |
In general, many bilingual or Spanish-speaking agents available with outsourcing partners are nearshore agents, meaning they live and work in countries outside of, but geographically close to, the US, such as Puerto Rico or Mexico. By hiring agents who live and work in lower cost areas, you can maximize your budget while offering comparable, cost-of-living-adjusted salaries.
Further, outsourcing (should) offer you the flexibility to scale up or scale back as needed. For example, with ROI CX Solutions, we intentionally take on clients who have opposing seasonality from each other so we can easily scale their teams up with already-trained agents during peak seasons, and back during less busy seasons. Not only does this provide exceptional service year-round for our clients, it also saves them money by paying for only what they need.
A Spanish Call Center You Can Trust
Choosing the right Spanish call center involves a lot of considerations, but finding the right one doesn’t have to be a shot in the dark. Just keep in mind the four areas discussed above:
- linguistic and cultural competency
- expertise and experience
- technology and infrastructure
- cost-effectiveness and flexibility
By evaluating each of the aforementioned areas carefully, you’ll have no trouble finding a trustworthy and quality provider who can develop your multilingual services to grow your customer base, improve customer satisfaction and strengthen customer experiences.
In a pinch and need to scale quickly? For an industry-leading multilingual call center provider you can trust to deliver results, contact ROI CX Solutions. Our multilingual agents can provide your company with high-quality service in a variety of languages, allowing you to reach your customers and connect with them for life.
Connect with an expert from ROI CX Solutions today to see how multilingual call centers can set your customer service apart.
