Inability to staff appropriately with the right language skills and in a timely fashion results in loss of business. Losing good talent because of lack of management support and inability to communicate in the employees’ language costs a company in the long run.
Read the press release here.
Have you ever stood at a starting line, the head of a long trail, or beginning of a big project and felt intimidated? Not sure how you are going to reach your destination or goal? Maybe even scared to start and wonder how in the world you are going to finish? You are not alone!
Operating a contact center efficiently and profitably is a difficult task. It is only made more difficult with unpredictable events such as COVID-19 that have accelerated the need for digital transformation and workplace flexibility. In the last decade, as I built an offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) focused on staffing software developers and a 500-plus-seat market research contact center, I constantly looked for an edge in recruiting and customer satisfaction. Every contact center manager and executive is looking to: 1) hire and retain the best talent and 2) improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores in order to increase the bottom line. For onshore, offshore, and nearshore bilingual staffing, accurate language screening plays a crucial role in recruiting, retention, and customer experience.
I have the pleasure of leading our customer success team here at Emmersion. As our department name implies, the customer success team has the responsibility of ensuring that our customers find success using our language testing system. In onboarding new customers, before we jump into training and implementation, we start by asking them about their business goals and objectives.
Call center growth is continuing at a record pace. And, as emerging countries’ economies stabilize, call center sourcing is becoming more and more global. While India was once the center of all call center development, now Jamaica, Ecuador, Brazil, the Philippines, and other countries are quickly developing call center production. Regardless of location, call centers still face many of the same challenges.
Yes, it is still important in a down economy!
Key Questions:
Recently, I wrote an article for ICMI discussing how to use—and when not to use—interview-style assessments to screen for job candidate language ability. Over my career, I have worked with language teachers, administrators, and other professionals to develop their skills in capturing and evaluating language performance data. An interview-style approach, despite its limits, also has a lot of advantages. Selfishly, of its greatest benefits is that it is one of the most enjoyable to employ as a language-tester. It is a satisfying way to connect with the person that you are evaluating.
Okay maybe it’s not just the French’s fault altogether. While it may be impossible to count the exact number of words in a language, nobody argues that English is in the top 5. Some argue there are more than 750,000 words in the English language, others argue it’s more around 150,000. Korean seems to dwarf most with over one million words. Vocabulary alone; then, can makes English language learning a headache.
Whether a young man in the Philippines seeking employment with an English-speaking contact center or a young woman in Japan wanting to study in the United States, bilingual opportunity seekers must gain—and prove that they have gained—proficiency in the English language.
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