AI call center bilingual agents are invaluable as they can work alongside LLMs to reduce the average call handle time with real-time assistance at every step. Similarly, first-call resolution is likely to be well-supported by AI in contact center operations, as they can look up the nuances of a customer’s call in real time and find ways the issue has been resolved in the past when things get challenging.
A full bilingual contact center AI transformation offers additional support through language detection and direct training to ensure agents remain accent-neutral. These keep interactions much more precise without losing the empathy that real agents bring to the role.
The Evolving Role of AI in Contact Centre Operations
Recently, AI has been shifting inexorably from after-the-call analytics to serving as real-time co-pilots in multilingual AI customer service. By utilizing such tools in a nearshore bilingual contact centre, AI can:
- Speed up the collection of call summaries
- Record and respond to different caller dispositions
- Offer knowledge suggestions
- Give up-to-the-minute training
It can also do all this while agents remain in control of the situation, with the AI acting only as a recommending force.
People may think the future of how AI supports bilingual agents includes complete QA automation and language-aware assistance, reducing transfers between teams. However, such tools already exist, and Centris uses them daily to empower our agents to provide better support than ever.
Why Bilingual Contact Centers Pose Unique Challenges and Opportunities
Can AI support Spanish-English customer service? Well, it can, but it shouldn’t do so on its own. There are still areas where AI is unable to understand the complexity, such as:
- Shared cultural or time-based contexts
- Idioms
- Powerful accents
- Non-monolithic culture and language-based touchstones
You need an AI to understand these specific issues to offer the best possible service. However, this lack of capability is why Centris still uses human agents to handle all key conversations, using AI only as a tool.
Accent-Neutrality and Cultural Nuance
How is AI changing bilingual contact centres? At our Centris locations, we are already using AI in our QA efforts to ensure our team can perform their roles better with each call. These efforts include:
- Training team members on responding to different cultural archetypes
- Offering bilingual empathy scripts
- Coaching with phonetic tools without enforcing a uniform accent
- Offering localized policy language to ensure regional understanding
It can also rate our team members on how well they perform across a wide range of tasks. These steps give our team members a better understanding of their roles and how to serve our customers better from day one.
Language Detection & Routing in Real Time
Our systems allow an AI to detect the language a customer is using via the IVR (interactive voice response) system. Then, when it detects that someone is using an alternate language, the system can either ask whether the customer wishes to switch or switch automatically, depending on a set of rules.
Key AI Capabilities That Turn Bilingual Operations From Cost Centre to Competitive Advantage
What should bilingual call centres know about AI? Well, conversational chatbots can work well, but only as a first step in a journey. Beyond that, the nuances of any interaction grow in magnitude and require a human mind to sort through.
Conversational AI + Multilingual NLP
AI can act as a real-time coach, offering phrasing suggestions or other assists. These can keep an agent on track and give them key insights at all times.
Real-Time Sentiment & Language Analytics
You should ensure you create systems that can detect sentiment or conversational red flags in real time. Your team can then use these to give your customers the best chance of avoiding risks.
How Centris Integrates AI Into a Nearshore Bilingual Model (Case Examples)
We already make use of a full-automated call auditor. The system analyzes each call using set criteria to ensure we continually know how to iterate towards improvements.
Questions to Ask When Adopting AI in Your Bilingual Contact Centre
It’s vital to ensure you are moving in the right direction when adopting AI, for both the needs of your team and customers, and to ensure regulatory compliance:
- What data will the AI see?
- Where will we store prompts and transcripts?
- What tasks are for only AI, and which require supervision from agents and supervisors?
- What are our AI KPIs?
- What training will you offer to ensure the AI continues to learn from further interactions?
Getting Started: Roadmap for Bilingual Operations With AI
First, define all the use cases for the AI, clarifying which data, metrics, and compliance steps you need. You should also ensure someone is directly responsible for each of these to prevent creating a bystander effect. Then, you will need to build it:
- Phase one involves creating a “pilot agent” to perform simple tasks alongside a regular agent, learning from them, and testing responses on them.
- Phase two allows you to scale this effort up by focusing your prompts further, after which phase three lets you plug in your CRM and knowledge base.
- You can start by automating summaries to ensure the AI understands the context of your interactions.
- Over time, you can then offer agents access to the real-time analyses it makes. You should also test it regularly to ensure that its interactions remain fair and correct for all.
Ensuring Your AI Call Center Bilingual Efforts Succeed
With two nearshore contact centers offering both English and Spanish support and over 30 years of experience with bleeding-edge technology, we have quickly advanced our efforts to blend AI tools with human agents. Doing this has dramatically improved our compliance and responsiveness across the board, resulting in savings of up to 45% for our customers.
Explore how Centris Information Services can combine AI call center bilingual support with nearshore operations. Contact us for a consultation on your bilingual customer-service strategy.
