Calling All Cultures: Multicultural Marketing And The Contact Center

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Jul 2005 by MacDonald, Thomas

What is the key to operating a state-of-the-art, fully equipped contact center? Is it employing the best and most educated agents? Finding the most appropriate sites for your operations? What about using the latest and greatest technology?

Of course, the answer falls within all of the above, but there is more to the equation. Your contact center may have the best employees and all of the latest technology to efficiently serve customers, but arc you equipped to serve the rapidly growing and increasingly influential multicultural market? To thrive in today's global business environment, companies in all industries - from financial services and insurance to retail and healthcare - must both acknowledge this significant market segment and create a contact center environment that caters to those within each segment.

In the United States alone, the multicultural population is nearing 100 million people, and the combined buying power of African-American, Hispanic and Asian-American markets is valued at more than $1.3 trillion. This means that the ability to reach diverse markets in culturally relevant ways will become the differentiating factor for businesses worldwide, providing new business opportunities, untapped market segments and the potential for increased profitability to companies that answer the call. Further, as multicultural outreach becomes a more standard part of marketing strategy, contact centers must be prepared to both ensure continuity and fulfill their end of the customer experience.

Why is multicultural marketing so critical in today's contact center industry? Think about your contact center and your customer service representatives: Are they prepared to serve customers who don't speak English? Studies have shown that customers are much more comfortable doing business in their native languages and that customer satisfaction and retention levels benefit when customers can use their primary language to communicate. Taking advantage of this knowledge can help in building goodwill and loyalty with customers, which can go a long way toward boosting your company's bottom line.

Yet many contact centers still lack the skills, resources and technology to effectively reach diverse markets. So how do you develop the strategy and incorporate the necessary tools to take advantage of the growing multicultural segment?

Beyond Talking The Talk

Traditional multicultural marketing means providing telephone support to non-English-speaking customers through over-the-phone interpretation. However, the marketplace has changed drastically and the need for culturally relevant customer service is so strong, it has driven today's technology well beyond the "press one for English and two for Spanish" standard.

To truly excel in the global marketplace, however, your contact center requires more than basic translation capabilities - you must be able to take your company's multicultural marketing strategy a step further.

Knowing the language is only the first step to effective global communication. Truly understanding other cultures, including their business practices and ways of life, is the key to a successful contact center strategy. For example, you may be confident that your target audience includes a significant population of Asian-American consumers, but do you know what percentage of that market is made up of consumers from Chinese, Korean or Japanese descent? Further, do you know the cultural distinctions between relevant subgroups and the implications for how you communicate?

Cesar Melgoza, president of market research firm Geospace International, notes: "Many companies are aware of broad customer demographics but don't take the time to dig deeper into the cultural nuances that define the unique needs of a given audience."

According to Melgoza, vast cultural variations make understanding and capturing a culture a complex process; and they occur due to a variety of factors, one of which is generational acculturation. Acculturation is the process of adopting the behavior patterns of surrounding cultures. For example, cultural differences that exist between first- and fourth-generation Asian-Americans might call for a completely different marketing approach. Therefore, companies that want to successfully develop relationships and build business with multicultural populations must develop a complete knowledge base. This includes everything from significant cultural differences and how they should be addressed, to all of the "little things" that can't be uncovered from basic research.

The key to effective research is going beyond mere census information to ask key questions, such as the following: What do consumers within a given culture really care about when they pick up the phone or send an e-mail? How do they prefer to communicate with you? Answering these questions will help you develop a complete multicultural marketing and service strategy for your contact center, and will ensure that your value proposition and your brand promise don't get lost in translation.