Lionbridge is paving the way for more inclusive customer communication

As any good communicator knows, making people feel seen and heard is the key to quality conversation and long-term relationship building. In a more virtual world, that’s even harder (and more important) given the loss of in-person social cues that normally guide a conversation. Add in people speaking different languages and you have grounds for a conversational dealbreaker.

This is where Lionbridge steps in. From enabling conversations between English-speaking customer service agents and foreign-language speaking consumers, to creating or transforming content for a global audience in hundreds of languages, Lionbridge supports brands worldwide on their global journey and ensures that governments and nonprofits can deliver their services to any and all people, regardless of the language they speak.

Enabling a high-quality multilingual customer and workforce experience is critical to Lionbridge’s clients. From a consumer placing a traditional phone call on a customer service line to a sophisticated international company providing multilingual IT support to its employees around the globe, Lionbridge supports CX and WX interactions with state-of-the-art language services, all the while retaining a caring, empathetic touch.

For its over-the-phone interpretation (OPI) services, Lionbridge meets the needs of companies, government agencies, healthcare providers, and more as they interact with their callers in more than 350 languages.

“We want our customers to feel like they are our only customer. And we want their customers to feel like they are our customers’ only customers. Our go-to-market, operations, and product teams collaborate to design and support both of those interaction models,” said Susan Gryder, director of OPI sales.

Giving voice to the individual means that despite the size of their customer base (which includes everyone from Fortune 500 companies to local healthcare providers), Lionbridge’s OPI team treats each call as a real-time multilingual voice experience.

Making conversation

“With our prior communications platform, it took a lot of time to make changes. Since our focus is on flexibility for our customers, we wanted the ability to make changes ourselves, to provide the kind of customization our customers expected,” Product Manager Virginia Hinders explained.

Lionbridge began looking for a partner that offered the same experience they promise their own customers, one of both personalization and flexibility.

Twilio in particular impressed the team with how easy the platform was to build and engineer a solution that would deliver a better experience for both customers and interpreters.

With Twilio’s stability and flexibility, Lionbridge found the tools they needed to manage and personalize their own platform to the extent their own customers wanted and needed.

“We saw how easy it was to build with Twilio and that we could easily engineer a solution that would deliver a better customer experience for both our customers and interpreters. One of our goals was a solution that would let us easily scale with the OPI market and changing landscape, and we found that with Twilio,” Hinders said.

Getting personal

Currently, Lionbridge uses several Twilio products and solutions including Programmable Voice for over-the-phone interpretation, Twilio Insights, Twilio Client (WebRTC), and voice recognition.

“Our customers expect a smooth experience in multiple languages, whether they are communicating internally or externally. This includes the ability to provide customer-specific features like multiple layers of metadata, reconnect options, real-time reporting, faster connection times, and additional IVR customization,” Hinders said. “Thanks to Twilio, we’ve been able to offer all of these features to our clients. Twilio makes all we can imagine possible when it comes to delivering the world’s best customer experience to our customers.”

And with the quality phone connection and seamless telephony support, Lionbridge has also seen an increase in customer satisfaction as they reach record connection time to interpreters. Further, Lionbridge provides customers with flexible customization on the fly, which makes onboarding fast and easy.

The bridge to more inclusive communication

For more than 20 years, Lionbridge has prided itself on giving every customer the ability to join the conversation regardless of what language they speak. With Twilio, Lionbridge can continue to provide their flexible and customer-centric solutions for communicating with an audience speaking almost any language used across the globe.

Above all, Lionbridge sees itself as a connector, a conduit to building bridges across all channels, and they want to be a partner with each client in building that bridge for more inclusive language to each of their customers.

‘We are always looking for ways to improve our client experience and build on our services. Lionbridge has some exciting developments ahead that leverage Twilio’s flexibility to provide the most modern, innovative, simple and helpful language solution for our customers,” Hinders said.