SG1Props

Our support team is starting to get more calls from customers outside the US, and language coverage is becoming a problem. We can handle English and Spanish internally, but calls in French, German, Italian, and a few other languages usually have to be transferred or followed up by email. Hiring separate agents for every language doesn't make much sense at our current volume. Is there a practical way to let the same support team handle live calls in different languages without relying on an interpreter for every conversation?

For the amount of traffic you're getting, I'd keep the same reps and add live speech translation to the calls. That gives you coverage for the languages that only show up a few times a day, while the agent still handles the customer from start to finish. For example, Azure AI Speech gives you real time speech translation through its API, so it can be tied into the call flow you already use. You can start with the languages that cause the most transfers and see how it holds up on actual support conversations.

You may also find that the language mix changes a lot from one day to another. French could barely come up today, then tomorrow German and Italian take over half the calls, so assigning people around that gets awkward pretty quickly. Look at AI for multilingual contact centers here: https://hitoo.io/ . I'd test it first on the calls that currently get transferred or pushed to email. That should show pretty quickly how much of the extra language coverage your current team can handle on its own.