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Foreign Speakers? BroadVoice Answers the Call

By Rory J. Thompson, Web Editor

If you’re running a call center and you’ve got incoming queries in numerous foreign languages, you run the real risk of alienating not only these callers, but also any others they might tell about the bad service they received.

In response to that possibility, a US telecom company, BroadVoice, allows people who have immigrated here to call back home.  BroadVoice is multi-lingual and has customer service that speaks all different languages, including English, Portuguese, Spanish and Farsi, among others.

Jim Murphy, president at BroadVoice, is well versed in the history of the company, and why it was established.

“BroadVoice started back in 2003, and although it’s changed owners since then, the mission is still the same: Provide a reliable VoIP service for a worldwide audience,” he said. “Back then, the Voice over IP market was coming out of the early ‘wild west’ phase and becoming a true business model. The first products were targeted at domestic US calling.”

Although it had humble beginnings, BroadVoice and its sister brands, VOIP.COM and Phone (News - Alert) Power now serve about 100,000 customers worldwide. And they’ve struck gold with a niche market that focuses on foreign-language speakers.

“There are 95 customer service agents at our call center in Los Angeles, spread over seven days a week,” Murphy said. “Walking the floor you can usually hear English, Spanish, Portuguese and Farsi, and due to customer requests, we are considering adding agents that speak Bengali and Mandarin Chinese; It feels like a mini United Nations at times,” he added. Luckily for BroadVoice, Los Angeles is a true ethnic melting pot, which makes hiring a little easier than if the company were located elsewhere.

Still, no matter what the language, the queries the call center receives vary little, Murphy said.

“There are the usual billing questions, initial setup questions, ‘How do I make this work on my smartphone’ or ‘Will this work overseas?’ types of questions,” he said. “Fairly standard stuff.”

But that “standard stuff” is money in the bank for BroadVoice, as the company eyes the future.

“We’ve already got a toehold in Latin America,” Murphy explained. “It first started with customers in the U.S. calling family back home. It then progressed to people buying the service, and sending the adapter to their family overseas.”

Now BroadVoice is starting to work directly with retailers in Brazil and Argentina to stock its hardware. While each country has a different sales process, and its own hurdles to overcome, 25 percent of its new sales come from existing customer referrals.

And Murphy sees nothing but success on the horizon. “Whether it’s South America, Asia or Europe, we continue to ride the customer wave wherever it takes us.”