Leading CX services company Concentrix and its consumer electronics client selected Unbabel to scale multilingual customer support operations across new languages in Asia, without having to hire native speakers.
Highlights
A major consumer electronics and networking technology company works with customer experience (CX) and business process outsourcing (BPO) leader Concentrix to scale its customer service operations around the globe. As the company and its BPO partner expanded into new Asian markets, they selected Unbabel to help scale multilingual customer chat and email interactions around the world. Today, the company uses Unbabel to offer multilingual support options globally, particularly when expanding into new markets, removing the need to hire native speakers.
About Concentrix
Concentrix Corporation (Nasdaq: CNXC), is a leading global provider of customer experience (CX) solutions and technology, improving business performance for some of the world’s best brands. The company’s objective is to create better business outcomes and help differentiate clients’ CX through technology, design, data, process, and people. Concentrix provides services to clients in key industry verticals: technology and consumer electronics; retail, travel and ecommerce; banking, financial services and insurance; healthcare; communications and media; automotive; and energy and public sector.
At a glance
- Over 100 Fortune Global 500 and 105 global disruptor clients
- Operates in 40 countries across 6 continents
- $4.72 billion in annual revenue in 2020
The challenge
Maintaining quality while expanding into Asia
A Concentrix client and global consumer electronics leader was rapidly expanding into new markets in Asia, and wanted to maintain its high quality multilingual customer service operations in over 50 countries around the world. Concentrix owns nearly 100% of these customer interactions via phone, chat and email, with the exception of a few smaller markets with low contact volumes.
As the company grew its global presence and expanded into new Asian markets, they were challenged by the costs of their traditional approach of adding native speakers to support customers in every new market. Typically, the company only deploys sales teams where a support structure is in place to back it up. This led to a chicken and egg problem, since there wasn’t sufficient budget to invest initially in native support agents before proving demand.
For Asian markets including Thai, Koren and Japanese, the company wanted to establish a support presence via chat and email before adding a native speaker. Ideally, this approach would help them test their success in the market before bringing in native-speaking support talent. In addition, it would enable them to ramp up sales immediately without waiting on customer support budget.
Rather than serve their new customers in a non-native language, the company found that there was an option to leverage their existing English-speaking Concentrix agents for multilingual translation, without sacrificing translation quality or response times.
The solution
Transforming multilingual support with AI
The Concentrix team had proven success and won numerous customer service innovation awards using the language operations platform Unbabel. “We’ve successfully partnered with Unbabel for other clients, enabling them to offer superior, native-language email and chat support at massive scale,” said Paula Kennedy, Vice President, Concentrix.
The consumer electronics client was a perfect candidate for language operations, an approach that blends AI and human interaction to scale a company’s multilingual customer communications efficiently and effectively. Concentrix knew Unbabel would be the best solution for this client, particularly since the company needed to prove the success of each new Asian market before dedicating the budget to onboard a native speaking agent. In addition, the company’s English-speaking agents could leverage Unbabel to decrease email and chat ticket volumes across any of the 27 supported languages.
Within its new markets, English-speaking agents field chat and email requests for Thai, Korean and Japanese. For example, if a Japanese customer submits an email helpdesk ticket, Unbabel translates the request to English so that the Concentrix agent can respond. First, Unbabel’s AI technology translates the agent’s response into Japanese. Then, a human editor double-checks the translation to ensure that it accurately reflects the agent’s original meaning, as well as cultural nuances of the Japanese language. The customer quickly and seamlessly receives a native language response from the agent, unaware that they don’t speak Japanese.
Breaking into new markets without breaking the bank
With Unbabel, the consumer electronics company solved its chicken and egg problem, expanding sales operations without a native-speaking support infrastructure in place for new Asian markets. Using Unbabel, the Concentrix team can support new inbound chat and email requests, while the sales team builds a critical presence in these markets. The client is assured that any new customer issues that arise will be addressed in a timely manner. Instead of investing in a native speaker, they only pay when a customer interaction is required.
“Best of all, the company was able to maintain its high bar for customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and transaction times with Unbabel. The company consistently meets its CSAT target of 90% or higher on Unbabel interactions, which is on-par with native speakers,” said Kennedy. “Agents across all Unbabel-served markets are able to reduce email and ticket volume, since Unbabel increases the number of agents available to respond to email and chat requests in 27 languages.”
Unbabel’s Impact:
- Concentrix agents equipped with Unbabel handle the majority of non-voice multilingual customer interactions across 27 languages.
- These agents maintained quality and transaction times, and enabled the sales force in Asia to ramp up operations.
- The company’s CSAT goal of 90% or better remained intact with Unbabel, on par with native language support.
Looking to expand across markets or optimize your multilingual operations with on-brand quality? Unbabel can help.
