How Elvie Cut Multilingual Support Costs By 50%

As a manufacturer of women’s health technology, Elvie retails products via its online storefront. With a small portion of its customer base being from non-English-speaking European countries, Elvie had historically delivered phone- and email-based multilingual support via fluent speakers. However, there were numerous frustrations with this approach related to inefficiency and cost.

Challenge

To start, the volume of non-English requests was too low to truly warrant having one agent dedicated to each European language, but the team couldn’t eliminate those roles as it would mean non-English speakers wouldn’t be able to receive in-language support. Scalability also proved to be an issue, as a French-speaking agent may have sat idle while a German-speaking agent experienced an influx of requests.

This approach also limited the brand’s available service hours and made expansion into new regions more challenging. Recognizing the many issues with this approach, Elvie sought a solution.

Solution

Given the challenges of providing multilingual support via fluent speakers, Elvie required a solution that would allow its agents to communicate with any customer regardless of the language spoken. With Salesforce Chat and Case serving as the primary means of digital communications between agents and customers, the ideal solution needed to integrate seamlessly with Salesforce in order to leverage it in real-time conversations.

Having used Language I/O at a previous company, Elvie’s Contact Center Performance Manager recognized that the problems the team experienced with multilingual support would be solved using Language I/O. In early 2022, Elvie onboarded Language I/O, which instantly enabled any of its agents to chat and email with customers across several European languages, including Dutch, French, Spanish, Swedish, and German.

Outcomes

50% Reduction in costs

10+ Languages

24/7 Support Availability

The advantages of using Language I/O to support Elvie’s European customer base were immediately clear. With Language I/O implemented in Salesforce Chat and Case, Elvie no longer needed to rely on fluent-speaking agents to service several languages. This gave the brand the flexibility to restructure the customer service team with a focus on providing 24/7 multi-language support using its best agents, regardless of what language they spoke. In doing this, Elvie cut the cost of providing multilingual support by 50%.

With Language I/O powering multilingual customer support, Elvie also has the ability to easily grow into new markets without worrying about staffing up native speakers in those regions. Upon expanding into the United Arab Emirates, Elvie simply switched on Arabic in Language I/O and was extremely pleased with how easy and seamless providing Arabic support to this new market was. As they prepare to launch in Japan, the team is confident that providing Japanese support will be just as hassle-free.