How did a global food brand learn to evaluate and apply AI translation to boost employee experience and deliver CX in 80 languages?
The goal
To create and maintain a sustainable, scalable approach to multilingual customer experience that balances brand integrity and high service quality while lowering operating costs and optimizing human resources for an improved employee experience.
The outcome
81%
drop in agent attrition
100%
increase in occupancy rates
96%
CSAT
80
languages supported
The challenge
Our client, a leading multinational food manufacturing company, was struggling to optimize the per-transaction costs of its existing approach to customer experience delivery across the U.K. and continental Europe. Its CX operations, which support 16 languages and are delivered by a 22-member team, were established primarily for customer engagements relating to product recalls, quality complaints or questions regarding promotions or campaigns. However, due to the high quality and consistency of its products, agents — particularly those assigned to smaller European markets — may go an entire workday without handling a single customer interaction.
While an envious position to be in from a brand perception and quality perspective, in terms of employee experience and cost to serve, the situation was becoming unsustainable. Agent attrition rates stood at 6.5% and occupancy rates averaged 29%.
Our client wanted a new approach that addressed these challenges, and while it was clear technology would be a key enabler of any proposed solution, due to the growing hype around its capabilities, the client was understandably skeptical about integrating AI into its operations without a clear use case and proof of concept.
The solution
Support delivered from the U.K. with 13 FTEs.
Industries
Retail & e-commerce, Manufacturing
Channel
Email
Languages
80 languages including Arabic, Danish, English, French and German
Our client’s biggest concern about making technology and automation central to CX delivery was the potential loss of nuanced communication and specific vocabulary that conveyed its brand and created personalized interactions with customers across different European markets. To address this, we worked with the client to evaluate various tools, such as crowdsourced translation services, and leveraged our multilingual capabilities for linguistic accuracy benchmarking. This helped the client understand the strengths and limitations of each technological solution, providing a clear frame of reference for judging AI and its relative performance.
Through this evaluation process, we agreed on a customized real-time machine translation platform designed to embody the client’s brand across all major European languages. The solution was integrated with the client’s bespoke email-handling tool and introduced in a pilot phase over four months. During this period, the tool was set up to allow any agent to deliver native-language email responses in 10 European languages, calibrated to reflect the client’s specific terminology and brand language. Each response generated was assessed for accuracy by native speakers across our network of multilingual CX hubs.
With consistent accuracy confirmed, the solution was soft launched across those markets, but without fanfare so that the change in approach wouldn’t directly influence any deviation in CSAT figures or instances of direct customer complaints regarding service quality.
Results
81%
drop in agent attrition
100%
increase in occupancy rates
96%
CSAT
80
languages supported
Following the initial rollout, the client saw CSAT scores rise from 94% to 96%. And, having seen how well the solution performed, increased the project scope to cover 80 languages, enabling it to expand operations to provide direct, native-language support to every European country.
The tool’s ease of use — typically, agents required less than one hour’s training — also allowed significant optimization and redeployment of resources. The CX team was reduced to 13 tenured agents, allowing former members to be absorbed elsewhere in our organization within roles that offered greater engagement and job satisfaction. The combination of team reduction and service expansion increased occupancy rates by 100% and saw attrition rates fall by 81%.
The impact has been so great that we are currently working with the client to assess the tool’s suitability as part of a similar solution for CX delivery in synchronous channels such as online chat.