Access to quality online learning is an important step in helping people future-proof their skills and seek new opportunities for growth and development. The market has grown increasingly competitive as more and more people are accessing online courses to help them navigate today’s ever changing labor market.

The rise in demand continues an upward trend that predates the Covid-19 pandemic, which created an opportunity to increase remote learning enrollments. Additionally, an industry report from the World Health Organization (WHO) states that the number of students accessing online courses now exceeds pre-pandemic levels. The report reflects a 5x increase in employer provision of online learning opportunities for employees, a 4x increase in individuals independently seeking online learning opportunities, and a 9x increase in online learning opportunities created through government programs.

• 5x: increase in employer provision of online learning opportunities for employees
• 4x: increase in individuals independently seeking online learning opportunities
• 9x: increase in online learning opportunities created through government programs

Our partner, a global leader in the online learning space, experienced growth in all global markets. As a brand with a strong commitment to education accessibility, our partner required optimized language support to ensure they could continue to service customers cost-effectively in their own spoken language from their offshore centers of excellence.

The Challenge

Faced with a need for budget optimization, our partner required an innovative solution to deliver quality multilingual support at lower cost, including niche languages like Bahasa and Arabic.

They also needed to improve their time to react to new demand for long-term and ad-hoc language support, given that course enrollment varied by location and language of the student. Online learning is a paid service, and some learners expressed dissatisfaction when support in their preferred language was unavailable. This has traditionally been a challenge due to the availability of niche languages in their support center, which could extend between four to eight weeks to source and hire. As a result, when unexpected inquiries with brief surges or low volumes arose, the demand for multilingual support had often passed before temporary native support was established, and it was not cost-efficient to merit a permanent support resource.

For security reasons, they also needed to ensure that customer enquiries that did not have multilingual support staff available were not, in turn, managed via free-to-use third-party translation tools, which might incur a risk to data privacy or quality.

Solving these budgetary and language-expansion challenges became paramount to maintaining the brand’s mission of providing accessible, high-quality education worldwide.

The Solution

Despite optimizing their cost-to-serve with strategic offshore delivery locations, the premium for multilingual support staff remained double that of their top-performing English-speaking teams. Even in cases where multilingual demand is low in volume, a permanent support team requires a minimum of two people to optimize service-level agreement (SLA) consistency. For our partner, maintaining a series of small teams in this way was not efficient from a cost and performance perspective, which meant that delivering multilingual support for many languages was often on a best-endeavor basis, or defaulted to English support.

Our Mosaic Languages solution provided our partner with the ability to reduce existing operating costs by more than 50% and immediately extend their multilingual coverage. This was achieved by empowering our high-performing teams in Manila and Guatemala City with the ability to engage with new and prospective students in multiple other languages. This not only removed the need for premium native-standard staffing, but also removed the lengthy and costly hiring lead times by up to 75%, meaning global customers were more likely to have a response in their own language sooner.

• >50%: operating cost reduced
• 75%: lengthy and costly hiring lead times removed
• 10%: agent handle time improved

By seamlessly integrating the new multilingual tool into the brand’s online customer journey, chat and webform enquiries were managed more efficiently. With a streamlined interface to manage multilingual enquiries, agent handle time improved by 10%. By integrating the technology directly into the client’s tech stack, we also created a frictionless experience for the support agent. Combined, multilingual customers reported higher satisfaction (CSAT), and SLAs improved by 68.5% in 90 days, exceeding target.

• 68.5%: SLAs improvement in 90 days

The Results

Mosaic Languages has unlocked transformational change for our partner. Our solution has removed cost and location boundaries that previously limited their ability to provide consistent multilingual support for customers, and replaced it with on-demand accessibility to more than 100 languages. This has created resilience for future short- or long-term demand, and optimized their potential to maximize revenue and student enrollment numbers.

Within the first 90 days of implementation, our partner empowered 90% of their support team to engage in four languages, in addition to their native English or Spanish.

We achieved the following results:

• 68.5%, Service-Level Improvement: Enabling faster response and management of customer inquiries
• 10%, Reduction in Average Handle Times (AHT)
• 12%, Headcount Reduction: Optimizing the team efficiency and cost

Comparing the team performance, year-over-year from 2022-2023, the brand now operates with a net 30% improvement on contact rates and a 6% increase in CSAT.

The initial results underscore the positive impact of Mosaic Languages in improving the quality of service provided to individual learners and enterprise clients. Armed with new access to more than 100 languages, our brand partner’s future contact strategy has Mosaic Languages at its core with plans to expand into additional language support for more customers as a result of the first quarter’s results.

• 30%: improvement on contact rates
• 6%: increase in CSAT

Find out how IntouchCX can open your team to more than 100 languages with Mosaic Languages.