Bilingual technical support for a national telecommunications operator

Three problems at once. French service quality varied by shift and by site. A large and growing share of subscribers in the Greater Toronto and Vancouver areas were being served only in English despite speaking Mandarin, Cantonese or Punjabi at home, which lengthened handle times and drove repeat contact on billing disputes. And blended cost per contact was above the operator's benchmark, which removed the option of fixing quality by adding heads.

We designed a blended model on an explicit principle: work that must be in Canada stays in Canada, and everything else goes where it is delivered best and cheapest. French voice, complaints, regulatory-sensitive interactions and CRTC complaint handling are delivered from Quebec and Ontario. High volume English support, plus back office billing adjustment and provisioning, is delivered from the group's Manila and Bogota centres under the same governance framework, quality standard and reporting.

The language expansion was the highest impact change. Billing disputes handled in the subscriber's first language resolved faster and escalated less, because the explanation landed the first time.

Managed service with blended cost per contact, single account team and single governance forum across all sites.

Blended cost per contact reduced 34 percent against the operator's prior in-house baseline. Average handle time on billing enquiries in Mandarin, Cantonese and Punjabi fell by roughly a third against the English-only baseline. Repeat contact within seven days reduced 29 percent. French quality scores stabilised above target and stopped varying by shift. Customer satisfaction improved across every language queue within two quarters.

The operator had treated language coverage as a cost to be minimised. Serving subscribers in their own language turned out to be the cheapest available option, because it removed the rework that the English-only model was generating.