Lionbridge Technologies has broadened its GeoFluent real-time translation technology to include new omnichannel customer care features for contact centers. With these new features, customers can deliver real-time multilingual interactions across all communication channels, from virtual and agent-assisted chat to email, in-call voice, social, SMS, forums, knowledge bases, help desks, and ticketing.
"We're working in a multichannel, multilingual environment, and we now enable omnilingual communications across the full spectrum of channel," says Tom Tseki, vice president and general manager of customer care solutions at Lionbridge.
GeoFluent, a cloud-based offering, currently supports 92 languages. It combines machine translation technology with live interpreters to translate conversations in real time.
GeoFluent also offers Lionbridge's patented enhanced linguistics layer that fixes quality issues and preserves key industry and company terminology, brand and product names, acronyms, shorthand, and glossaries to ensure accurate representation of trademarks, product names, and brand elements in every language. "We fully customize the engine with specific industry and company information to ensure that there is 100 percent translation accuracy," Tseki says.
But having a third person in the middle of every conversation between customers and agents adds to average call handling time, so Lionbridge recommends using voice as an escalation channel from other, less expensive channels, like chat, text messaging, or social media. The hope is that by enabling omnilingual capabilities within self-service and digital channels, it will deflect inbound calls to the contact center.
GeoFluent also includes new real-time dashboards and reports that provide insight into consumer engagements by both channel and language.
Marc Osofsky, senior vice president and general manager of global offerings at Lionbridge, stressed GeoFluent's cost-saving potential in a statement.
"Providing multilingual customer care traditionally required hiring agents, establishing in-country contact centers, and/or using over-the-phone interpretation services. GeoFluent changes the game by spanning all communication channels, allowing brands and [contact center outsourcing firms] to match consumer's communication preferences, regardless of language. Combining omnilingual with omnichannel enables contact centers to deliver the greatest global customer experience at a fraction of the cost."
GeoFluent integrates with leading communications platforms, from complete omnichannel providers to single channel offerings. GeoFluent is integrated into customer communication systems from LivePerson LogMeIn, Moxie, Salesforce.com, Verint Systems, Zendesk, and others.
"We are technology-agnostic. We work with any translation engine and contact center platform," Tseki says.
Lionbridge works with more than 800 companies worldwide.
Keith Lodewyk, customer care team lead at RCI, a Lionbridge client, praised GeoFluent in a statement.
"As an Ireland-based contact center, it's essential to provide real-time translation to our global customers in an efficient way. With Lionbridge's GeoFluent implemented to our existing Moxie chat application, our English-speaking contact center agents were able to conduct real-time chat sessions in Spanish. The impacts have been significant, including increased customer satisfaction and reduced customer effort, coupled with increased call deflection and not having to hire as many multilingual agents. This combination makes GeoFluent a great fit for RCI and our members."
Bill Ratliff, senior vice president of operations at Getaroom.com, another Lionbridge customer, said in a statement that the solution helped his company continue to grow.
"Getaroom.com's rapid global expansion created a unique language-specific demand seemingly overnight. Lionbridge's GeoFluent solution has allowed us to continue our growth trajectory through this quick and cost-effective solution, enabling us to quickly scale our multilingual customer support. The implementation, support, and overall process far exceeded our expectations, and we are thrilled to have Lionbridge's GeoFluent in our corner."
Lionbridge employs more than 100,000 professional cloud workers to provide translation, online marketing, global content management, and application testing solutions. It first introduced the GeoFluent solution about three years ago.
"Now [GeoFluent] is more of a full portal. It's now a true cloud-based platform that users can log in to to gain insight into channel usage across languages," Tseki says.