Call Center Greetings in Multilanguage Applications

Let’s talk about your call center.

A call center may not seem like the most important part of your business, but when you think about it, it might very well be the area that your customers will spend the most time and interaction with. Call center greetings create the first impression that will hang over the rest of a caller’s interactions with your company, not to mention communicate your company’s brand to new and existing clients. For that reason, multilanguage call center greetings should be an active consideration for any modern company.

In the past, we’ve written about why it is always a good idea to use a professional voice talent to record these IVR prompts, since a professional voice talent will be better able to maintain consistency of performance across the fragmented audio sections that will be combined into a final message.

Going a step beyond this initial idea, it is always worth considering that the modern marketplace gets more and more global each year. Even if we limit our scope to North America, there are a wide number of languages that you might expect to encounter every day, depending on where your company is located or where a call is coming from.

At the very least, you should consider creating call center greetings that feature a recording in Spanish and/or a recording in French, though which one takes priority might be a matter of geography. Companies who do a lot of business in and around Canada, for example, would be very well advised to have some kind of greeting ready for a French-speaking audience.

And, again, depending on where your company and client base are located, other languages should be in active consideration. For example, Marketing Messages is located in Massachusetts (say that five times fast!) and Massachusetts is home to more than one quarter of the foreign-born Portuguese speaking population in the US. And of those hundreds of thousands of Portuguese-speakers, close to half of them are Brazilian. So companies located in areas with heavy concentrations of Brazilian-born Portuguese speakers would be wise to have at least a Brazilian Portuguese greeting, if nothing else, ready for use.

Beyond the practical benefit of making interaction with your call center and company easier for people who speak English as a second language, utilizing multilanguage call center greetings is a way to communicate to your client base that you are a company that is willing to make the extra effort, that you care about being accessible and available to anyone who calls in. Not every company makes these kinds of efforts, so establishing yourself as easy-to-use and considerate in the very basic areas that others overlook is a great way to distinguish yourself from the competition.

If multi-language professional voice recordings are something you would like to pursue, then for starters check out some of our previous blogs on the dos and don’ts of this process. Put simply: Be specific as to your needs, especially concerning which dialect and region you need (i.e. will your Portuguese recording be for Brazilian Portuguese or European Portuguese? Will your French recording be for a European audience or a Canadian one?), and utilize a professional translator and a professional voice talent whenever possible, as this will ensure high-quality final productions with the minimal possible time or confusion.

Ultimately, the call center, and the call center greetings, are a major part of how your customers will interact with your company so the voice becomes a part of your brand identity. It is always worth asking if you can go the extra step and utilize this avenue of customer interaction in a way that others might not have. How can you make a call center that is easier to use than another company in your field? Can you build one that caters to the widest possible range of potential clients?

Ask yourself these questions, but also feel free to ask us. That’s the kind of thing we are here to help with.