Voiance Language Services Blog

How Your Interpretation Provider May Be Compromising Your Operations

Written by Graham Newnum | Sep 19, 2018

Does your contact center offer interpreters to non-English speaking callers? Most do, and for good reason – one in five US residents today speaks a language other than English at home, and nearly one in ten lacks the English proficiency to do business without an interpreter.

But is the company that provides your interpretation and translation services trustworthy? Reliable? Secure? Those are harder questions, and the truth is that most contact center leaders don’t know. Choosing a language services provider is a side project for most, and leaders are often convinced to make the decision on price alone, unaware that choosing the wrong partner may lead to:

Prolonged outages at critical moments

For industries such as property and casualty insurance, air travel, utilities, and shipping, bad weather – like last week’s Hurricane Florence - or damaged infrastructure may increase your call volume as customers call in with problems and needs. Accidents happen. Lightning strikes. Construction equipment severs buried phone lines. Sections of particular cities lose power.

If your language services provider hasn’t prioritized reliability and redundancy, your spike in call volume may occur just as their service is knocked offline.

Calls to Voiance go through data centers and communication platforms focused on business continuity and system redundancy. We provide 99.999% system availability and a fault-tolerant telephone and networking system with no single point of failure. We utilize a documented Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan (DRP-BCP). We also partner with multiple telephone service providers to prevent a carrier outage from interrupting service.

Customer data at risk

2017 was a terrible year for data breaches. Most contact centers interact with their customers’ personal data – Social Security numbers, banking information, credit card data, etc. – and for non-English speaking customers, that information also passes through your language services provider’s interpreters.

If your language services provider relies exclusively on independent contractors working overseas in unsecured and unmonitored environments, what recourse will you have if they compromise customer data? Your organization may have liability.

Every Voiance call is handled by an interpreter living and working in the continental US, subject to monitoring and legal accountability, should the need arise. Each employee interpreter is thoroughly vetted (including background checks) prior to hiring and receives 120 hours of dedicated classroom training – covering ethics, privacy, and security – prior to taking client calls. Our large-scale, US-based interpreter contact centers are secured, monitored, and ISO 9001:2008 compliant. 

Overbilling, whether intentional or accidental

Contact centers that fail to closely monitor vendor invoices can fall victim to overbilling and unspecified add-on charges. Sometimes, these are honest mistakes; sometimes, they're not. Risk factors for overbilling by your language services provider may include:

- Multiple departments, divisions, levels, and locations using the service, making it harder to track total utilization

- A payer of invoices who is unfamiliar with how language services work or what they should cost

- No single person with language services expertise reviewing invoices and ensuring accuracy

Voiance provides our clients with near-real-time access to phone and video interpretation utilization data via our web portal, enabling our clients to track use between different departments and team members. We provide transparent, itemized, easy-to-read invoices, sent regularly and available via the web portal, making it easy for clients to confirm they pay only what they owe. And we employ dedicated account managers, available to help optimize utilization and answer client questions about interpreter interactions, invoices, and billing for services.

Want more information on selecting a language services provider? Check out our Interpretation Services Request for Proposal guide for contact centers:

Ready to learn more about keeping your language services secure, correctly billed, and online during natural or man-made disasters? Email info@voiance.com or give us a call at 1-844 727-6739.