A recent survey of 2,850 UK contact centre operations has found that only 14 per cent offer some form of multilingual capability. Where non-English languages are offered, Western European languages dominate. This prevalence can be explained by the operation of pan-European contact centres in the UK, especially in the IT sector. The travel and tourism sector also has a relatively high level of support for non-English languages, as the nature of its business means contact with non-UK customers is likely.
It is surprising how few contact centres officially support Asian languages, considering the number of Asian non-English speakers in parts of the UK.
Very large contact centres are more likely to offer higher levels of multilingualism, (25 per cent of 500-1,000 agent position operations do this), although with the exception of the very smallest contact centres, the proportion remains fairly constant across size-bands at around 13-15 per cent.
The South-East/London regions have the most multilingual contact centres, probably due to the large numbers of non-UK nationals living there. Welsh contact centres come out in first place for multilingualism, but this is only due to the need to support Welsh in many Welsh contact centres.
Steve Morrell
[email protected]
http://www.contactbabel.com/
2003-04-14
Em Foco – Opinião