Inefficient call routing, natural disasters, and other outages could prevent access to interpreters at critical moments. What would you do if your current multilingual support provider experienced a service failure?
Things can spiral quickly. For industries such as property and casualty insurance, air travel, utilities, and shipping, the same bad weather or damaged infrastructure that knocks out multilingual support may increase your call volume as customers – including the roughly 10% of US residents unable to do business in English – call in with problems and needs.
Without interpreters, these non-English calls may back up the queue, leading to delays for all customers. It’s essential to partner with a multilingual support provider dedicated to reliability and infrastructure redundancy – one that consistently stays online when disaster strikes.
Here are three criteria that may help your organization decide whether to depend on a potential language services partner:
1. Uptime and Reliability
What to Ask
Does your potential provider keep track of uptime and invest in redundant infrastructure to make sure a local issue doesn’t take down the whole system?
Why it Matters
Accidents happen. Lightning strikes. Construction equipment severs buried phone lines. Sections of particular cities lose power. If reliability isn’t prioritized and redundancy isn’t built in, factors like these can take your multilingual support provider offline when you need them most.
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.
2. Infrastructure Location
What to Ask
Does the potential partner’s network for handling calls run solely on US infrastructures, or do potential vulnerabilities exist offshore/internationally?
Why it Matters
Different nations and territories may vary significantly in the modernity and reliability of their electrical and telecommunications grids, as well as their vulnerabilities to various natural disasters and even sociopolitical upheaval. Puerto Rico, for example, has been without consistent power for much of the past year due to hurricanes and accidents involving infrastructure.
Voiance relies exclusively on interpreters living and working within the continental US, so every step of our interpreter calls run through US infrastructure. Various publicly available releases from major Voiance competitors disclose that they send interpreter calls to Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Honduras, Peru, Panama, Cape Verde, Puerto Rico, Senegal, and Colombia, leaving them vulnerable to outages in any of these locales.
3. Contact Centers vs. At-Home Call-Takers
What to Ask
Where do your prospective provider’s interpreters work? Are they all at home, or does the multilingual support provider maintain and staff interpreter contact centers?
Why it Matters
Most individual homes lack any sort of redundancy for their power and phone lines. If one of those goes out, the home-based interpreter is off-line and unable to take calls until power or functionality is restored.
Our employee interpreters work in the most extensive network of large-scale interpreter contact centers: thousands of interpreters working in an environment with built-in backup power and telephonic infrastructure to prevent local outages from taking us offline. Calls to one center can also reroute to any of the others in the event there is an outage at one location.
Would you like to learn more about partnering with Voiance for reliable, there-when-you-need-it multilingual support for your contact center? Interested in trying us out as a back-up provider in case your current partner experiences an outage? Contact us today at info@voiance.com
