September 1998

Managing Multilingual IT Support Centers In Europe

BY JOOP HEIJENRATH AND MARIE SHEAHAN,
STREAM INTERNATIONAL

The multilingual technical support market is growing as high-tech product sales climb worldwide. While language is the first barrier to providing comprehensive international technical support, the solution is not as simple as hiring multilingual employees. Cultural, technical and logistical issues demand attention as well. Together with language competence, they add up to effective multilanguage support.

Stream International, an outsource technical support provider, is no stranger to the challenges of language support. It serves hundreds of international technical companies with ten worldwide call centers that offer technical support in 13 languages. Through resolving more than one million IT issues per month, Stream has learned to recognize the demands and pitfalls of the international technical support market.

Stream located its European home base in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, because of the city's highly skilled, multilingual labor force and its international outlook. The Amsterdam center employs 550 support engineers. Stream also provides multilingual support in five languages from its center in Velizy, France.

Stream has implemented a variety of IT support programs that address complex language and technical issues to effectively serve the European community and parts of South America. Stream works to select support engineers with the right skillsets and provide them with the appropriate logistical and technical systems.

Stream selects its support engineers through a rigorous process based on native language, communication and IT skills. Stream requires expert fluency and competency in a minimum of two languages and employs many support engineers who are fluent in three or more languages. This allows them to effectively address each country's unique call patterns while maintaining state-of-the-art call management.

Most training is in English. However, Stream supplements English language training with technical and competency programs that consider the demographics and cultural elements of the multilingual marketplace. Most of the managers and mentors that oversee the multilingual teams are native or fluent speakers of the supported language. Therefore, all call coaching is done in the supported language. Stream is currently developing a dedicated team of coaching specialists who will work with support engineers to balance their language, technical and communications skills. These coaching specialists evaluate call quality to ensure every aspect of the telephone conversation and post-call process is an excellent experience for customers.

Stream encourages a multinational social environment to make the center a place where people enjoy spending time and it's a key reason why so many talented people are attracted to the company. Stream accommodates multiculturism in several ways, such as revising schedules so that support engineers could watch the 1998 World Cup soccer matches. Stream's company restaurant also offers an internationally diverse menu to suit specific cultural tastes. Multilingual IT support professionals also participate in a variety of planned social activities at the center.

Once a company assembles a technically and linguistically prepared workforce, the next hurdles are logistical and technical. A support center must provide IT engineers with high-tech call routing and comprehensive call schedules to properly meet client needs. Stream coordinates and reviews call schedules with the client on a weekly basis to ensure proper language coverage on specific hardware/software products. Call schedules are also planned around upcoming events, national holidays and specific call patterns.

Sophisticated call routing guarantees support engineers have both the language and technical expertise required to handle each call. Routing is customized to manage call treatment for the multilingual environment using switch technology that supports full skills-based routing. This ensures the most appropriately qualified support engineers service calls. The company can shift its service resources once support engineers have acquired the skills necessary to meet client demand. This enables Stream to optimize the extensive skillset of its support engineers on both the language and the technical skill axes.

Recognizing their customers have skillsets too, Stream offers a variety of options that allow the customer to control call routing according to language preference. For example, a native French caller fluent in English can have their call handled by an English support engineer. This allows support engineers to successfully resolve calls in significantly less time and maintain high quality customer service.

Stream uses its multilingual expertise to effectively manage complex workforce challenges in Europe. It's adapting automated workforce management tools implemented in North America for multilingual support in Amsterdam, which offers unique challenges because of skill-based routing's complexity.

Currently, Stream is developing knowledge-based databases built from the Amsterdam center's more than 2.5 million annual support requests. This will allow support engineers in all languages to provide an exceptionally high standard of customer service. The databases use neural network technology, an intricate computer structure that allows Stream's "intelligent" databases to seek and establish similarities and patterns within the stored information to provide support engineers with solutions to query-specific data searches.

A multilingual IT support center needs more than a thorough technical support engineer selection process to succeed. Ongoing training programs, an enjoyable work environment and sophisticated call scheduling, high-tech routing and information collection are key to achieving quality technical support for today's global community.

Joop Heijenrath is the general manager and vice president Europe for Stream International. He joined Stream in 1997 to head up the European operation. Prior to joining Stream he worked for KPN Telecom where he spear-headed multimedia ventures and the digital wireless GSM service in the Netherlands.

Marie Sheahan is operations manager at the Stream Amsterdam support center. She is responsible for the management and implementation of major projects throughout the center. Marie has extensive experience in managing call centers both in the Netherlands and Ireland, where she worked for the country's largest telecom operator as call center manager. Stream International is a market leader in the rapidly growing field of technical support outsourcing. Operating from ten worldwide service centers, more than 5,000 highly trained Stream service support engineers provide cost-effective technical support services via the telephone, e-mail, and the Internet in eleven different languages. Stream has European support centers in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Londonderry, Ireland; and Velizy (Paris), France, with a combined staff of 750 people. The Amsterdam center offers IT support in 11 languages in 20 countries.