The Challenge
Meeting the Growing Customer Experience Challenge
With an expanding international customer base, Spotify was faced with maintaining the right staffing levels to serve customers across a multitude of languages. The majority of non-English support cases were handled by Spotify’s European service centers, where scaling multi-lingual resources was often a supply-versus-demand challenge.
Spotify was searching for a way to use translation technology to route greater messaging volumes to other geographies so they could better scale without increasing operating expenses (OPEX), expanding their staff, or compromising the customer experience.
In addition, Spotify was looking for a sustainable solution to better manage cycles of attrition, shrinkage, scheduling, and seasonal ramps and peaks.
Outcome
Applying AI and Deep Learning for Real-Time Results
Sutherland partnered with Spotify on a proof of concept by performing automated email translation services for Spotify’s email support channel. The pilot program made use of Sutherland Translate AI™ — an AI-driven, real-time translation platform — to customize the right solution for non-English support.
They developed, tested, and implemented a system that could be quickly integrated with Spotify’s customer service delivery messaging tool, LivePerson Conversational Cloud®, beginning with the client’s Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking customers.
Applying AI and machine learning — and utilizing translation engines from its partners at Google, Microsoft Azure, and Deep Learning — the Sutherland Translate AI™ platform captured queries sent via web messaging, email, or social media in the customer’s native language and seamlessly converted them in real-time into the agent’s language, without losing detail or cultural nuance in the translation.
Now, for example, agents in the Philippines — who natively speak Tagalog and English — could correspond with and support Spotify customers using the streaming service in Latin America, where they mostly only speak Spanish.
The Sutherland solution enabled Spotify to scale its native language and streaming services in new markets while expanding service hours without compromising the quality of its customer experience.
The solution also allowed for more robust business continuity planning. With Sutherland Translate AI™, Spotify was able to more quickly respond to global events that impact customers in one region of the world more than another by increasing staffing in less affected areas without having to recruit, hire, and train agents with specific language abilities.
Through its partnership with Sutherland, Spotify can now better support customers who speak Arabic, French, Russian, Polish, Turkish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish with non-native language speakers. Coming soon? Real-time messaging translation in Swedish, Italian, Indonesian, and more.
