Bilingual service aids call centers

SPECIAL SECION B
Outlook 2003
THE MORNING CALL
SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 2003
www.mcall.com
Cesar L. Laure, The Morning Call, Inc., ©2003
VICKY FLORES, a bilingual employee with The Hartford insurance company, helps a caller. The Hartford has a 14-member bilingual team at its Fogelsville office.
Bilingual service aids call centers
Companies that have
Spanish speakers relate
to more customers.
CALLING LEHIGH VALLEY
Our area is home to several major call centers, where
workers answer customer phone calls.
Call center and numbers of operators employed
T-Mobile, Hanover Twp., Lehigh County
CALL CENTERS STAY
STRONG
500
The Hartford, Upper Macungie Twp.
490
By Edgar Sandoval
First Union/Wachovia, Allentown
Of The Morning Call
The phone rings at The Hartford
insurance center in Fogelsville, and
Edwin Martinez prepares his headset
to take the call.
A Spanish-speaking woman is on
the line from Puerto Rico. He tells her
in Spanish how much he misses the
tropical view. They exchange last
names, and soon the woman tells him
she knows his parents.
“You would be surprised how much
in common you have with people,”
said Martinez, who answered the
woman’s questions about her insurance benefits. “People appreciate when
you can relate to them.”
Call centers, which answer customer phone calls, are recognizing the
importance of Spanish-speaking customer service representatives like
Martinez. The nationwide growth of
Hispanics, the largest minority group
in the United States, has created a
demand for employees who can speak
and relate to Spanish-speaking customers.
Call centers also help those who
speak other languages, such as Korean
and Chinese. Some centers use phone
translating services. When a call comes
in from a non-English speaker, the
operator dials a phone service and is
aided by a translator.
More than 8 million people in the
United States do not speak English,
leading many companies to realize it’s
no longer enough for employees to
speak just one language, industry
experts say.
Some companies with offices in the
Lehigh Valley have taken note and are
expanding their bilingual call center
operations.
308
Aetna, South Whitehall Twp.
250
The Guardian, Hanover Twp., Lehigh County
100
NOTE: The companies have other local employment. T-Mobile, First Union, Aetna
and The Guardian, for example, have at least 1,000 total employees in Lehigh
and Northampton counties.
Cesar L. Laure, The Morning Call, Inc., ©2003
Source: Morning Call research
Gary Visgaitis, The Morning Call
FLORES works in The Hartford’s call center. Companies with bilingual
employees can provide better service to Spanish-speaking customers.
The Hartford insurance company,
for example, has established a 14-person bilingual team in Fogelsville. A
smaller bilingual team operates in Fort
Washington, Montgomery County.
More than 4,000 people work in
Valley call centers, according to the
Lehigh Valley Economic Development
Corp. and CareerLink Lehigh Valley.
Companies that operate large centers
here include First Union/Wachovia,
Aetna U.S. Health Services and
T-Mobile.
A company that provides directory
assistance services for wireless telephone
companies is headquartered in Hanover
Township, Northampton County.
Infonxx employs about 250 people
here and more than 2,000 other people
at a business office in London, four call
centers across the United States and
another in the Philippines.
While 2002 was a tough year for
employment in the Valley, some call centers were adding workers. In September,
Telerx said it would hire 100 customer
service employees at its offices in
Hanover Township, Lehigh County.
In the same municipality, T-Mobile,
formerly known as Voicestream Wireless,
last March opened a new center. The
company hired additional operators
throughout the year, and still planned to
add up to 100 representatives in 2003,
CareerLink reported in January.
Nationwide, the demand for Spanish
speakers continues to grow slowly, said
Scott Hovanyetz, a senior reporter for
DM News, an online newspaper for
direct marketers.
Other call centers are serving their
Spanish speakers by opening centers in
Latin America, Hovanyetz said.
Some of the largest national
companies with call centers in the
Valley operate their bilingual services
outside the region. T-Mobile, for
instance, has bilingual teams at call
centers in Albuquerque, N.M., and
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., but not in
Hanover Township.
The First Union call center in the
Valley reroutes its Spanish-language
calls to its Miami bilingual operation.
Aetna sends Spanish phone calls to its
Tampa office.
Guardian Life Insurance uses a
phone-translating service. An operator
who gets a non-English-speaking customer uses a phone line where a third
person can translate questions and concerns to the operator.
“The need is there,” said John Lopez,
who oversees the bilingual team at the
Hartford. “People are speaking more
than English, and if we want to reach
and keep those customers, we need to
speak the language they speak.”
Noting the growth of Spanish speakers in the area, the Hartford decided it
was time to take advantage of the local
pool of bilingual speakers, Lopez said.
The number of residents in the
Lehigh Valley who speak Spanish
instead of English at home surged 87
percent from 1990 to 2000, from
21,000 to 39,247, according to the
2000 Census.
Though The Hartford has had bilingual operators for years, it was not until
four years ago that it decided to establish a bilingual team to serve Spanishspeaking callers. The team expanded
from eight to 14 bilingual customer
service representatives.
The operators get calls from Puerto
Rico, Florida, California, Texas, New
York, New Jersey and other states, averaging about 788 Spanish-language calls
a week. The call center gets a total of
about 134,000 calls a week.
Customer service representatives
receive weeks of training and learn about
insurance and coverage-related information. But more than insurance knowledge, a good call center operator needs
to “have plenty of patience,” Lopez said.
“You need to not only communicate with the person, but also make
him or her feel comfortable,” Lopez
said. “You need to relate to the person, and a Hispanic can do that with
another Hispanic.”
Knowing the language and even
Latino customs have come in handy,
said Martinez, the customer service
representative. He started his career
with The Hartford about 14 years ago.
“You get blessed, and people tell me,
“When you come to the island, visit
me,”’ he said. “Some people get mad
when I tell them I was in Puerto Rico,
and I did not visit them.”
Martinez said Latinos are more likely
to open up to a person of the same
ethnicity, especially when discussing
private medical conditions and insurance policies.
The Morning Call Inc., Copyright 2003