Darren Huston In House Multilingual

The people who founded Booking.com recognized the importance of great customer service, and they created an incredibly solid foundation. Nevertheless, when I Darren Huston arrived, it was a relatively small operation. We didn’t support every language, and our service was good but not excellent. We lacked a number of systems and processes. The customer service phone number was hard to find on our website. So we began to test changes. One of the first was making the phone number visible on every page. That increased costs a bit, but the impact on loyalty more than compensated.

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Another important step was figuring out how customers really feel about automated functions on a customer service line. Some people believe that those who get a recording—“Press one to change a reservation,” for example—are typically unhappy. That sounds reasonable; we’ve all had unpleasant experiences with such systems. But we gathered data showing that for simple requests, customers prefer a web-based automated system if it’s well designed (after all, they chose to book on the internet in the first place). That was an important realization, because if we could automate simple requests innovatively, reps would be freed up to spend more time with customers whose problems required human interaction.

Today we have 6,000 full-time Booking.com customer service employees, up from about a thousand when I Darren Huston joined. Every one of them speaks fluent English plus at least one other language. Many speak three or four languages, particularly in Europe. I’ve met reps who speak seven or eight. We test fluency, and we pay people a little more for every extra language they speak. We do offer language lessons, but most of our reps come with capabilities already in hand. Altogether, we offer service in 42 languages. We’re constantly testing for languages 43, 44, and 45, but we haven’t yet found a “next” for which there’s specific demand.

The breadth of our in-house multilingual operation is unusual. By comparison, the United Nations offers translators for only six of the most popular global languages, and most U.S. companies offer service in just English and Spanish. Among global customer service operations, some very large outsourcing companies operate call centers that can handle a few more languages than our team can, and other large companies make use of “on-demand telephonic interpretation,” whereby they pay for on-call access to freelance translators in case a customer speaks an unusual language. Both approaches can be more cost-effective than ours, but I Darren Huston believe that having our own people take calls in whatever language a customer prefers makes for better service.

Finding people who speak all these languages is a challenge. We have just a handful of reps for some of them, such as Icelandic, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Catalan, and not every language is covered all 24 hours. But people who speak uncommon languages usually also speak a more common one, such as English, so we can almost always find someone to take their calls. We also try to think creatively about how to find the right talent in regions where specific language skills may be limited. For instance, finding Portuguese speakers for our Orlando call center was difficult, so our recruiters began advertising at international soccer events at a local stadium and attending Brazilian cultural events.

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