As many companies decide to expand, tackling language is one of the greatest challenges to go truly global. In traditional contact center strategies, this is mitigated by multilingual sites, nearshoring and offshoring. But to keep scaling your workforce is far from a perfect solution.

The innovation hypothesis
Our hypothesis was to somehow enable available agents in other countries and locations to offload the local team during load peaks. This would also make expansions to new regions easier, since you would not, have to recruit and train native speakers from day one. We were basically trying to find a multilingual site solution, with smart translation technology added to it for maximum flexibility.

Initial discovery
During the discovery and research phase, we faced the fact that the market is crowded with vendors, which mostly fit into two categories; full AI translation tools and plug-ins

In the first category, we were surprised to see how many vendors there are in the market with proprietary AI translation tools. The drawback with these solutions were mostly the language capabilities which were often limited to one or a few languages, with questionable quality overall. Most solutions excel in a single or very few languages but struggle with a wider capability.

In the second category, we found many different plug-in solutions based on one of the big tech companies’ translation tools. These are however seldom optimal for customer service operations – questions and intents are often product and feature specific, thus the standard translation tools from e.g. Google or Amazon do not always provide precise and relevant translations in a contact center context.

Solution
Here we came to realize that a combination of both vendor types was needed - using the personalization from our own skilled agents with the language power of intelligent technology. Today, we have enabled effortless and automated translation for both end users and agents in our Transcom operation, by integrating the most recognized translation engine directly into the conversation.

The quality of translations is high off the bat, and is continuously enhanced through our native speaking people in operations. Human interactions are also powered with agent assist type automation which guides the best possible result. As we tend to move fast, the MVP is currently up and running for our IT support. The solution can as of now support over 14 languages. At this stage, we are ready to launch this as a new emerging human operation and technology innovation solution.

Connecting emerging technologies with human operation to enhance CX and business efficiency for scale.