World Call Centers: 2009

Turning Call Centers into Profit Centers

The consumer backlash against unsolicited telemarketing and e-mails coupled with ever-increasing competition for customer attention has forced companies to take a new look at their inbound call centers.

Long considered a profit drain and necessary evil, inbound call centers are now seen as a critical link between an organization and its customers. Companies that have relied strongly on a carpet-bombing approach to marketing in the past are now using their inbound call centers to better target customers at the right time with the right offers.

The call center business model has historically been based on reducing the amount of time spent on each call in order to reduce costs and personnel. The quantity and not the quality of each call was the driver. Operational efficiency, in this model, was the over-riding goal -- not customer satisfaction, customer retention, cross-selling or up-selling. Rarely was a call center's operation tied to an organization's business goals or strategies.

Best Practices in the Call Center: Make Every Contact Count

It’s no secret that customers aren't buying much these days. The economic engines have locked and stalled, leaving businesses everywhere in freefall. While companies around the globe are jettisoning anything they can to slow the descent, none are ditching CRM . In fact, CRM may be the last remaining parachute: a fact realized during earlier turbulence.

"Like lemmings off a cliff, we watched one company after another make disastrous decisions about cuts to support during the 2001 tech crash: low-quality outsourcing unannounced cuts to support channels and hours, big support staff layoffs leaving long wait times and stressed agents," John Ragsdale, vice president of Research at SSPA, a large and influential industry trade group for technology service and support professionals, told CRM Buyer.

"This time around we know better: Every change that impacts customer satisfaction impacts the bottom line," Ragsdale explained. "Evaluate how every change made in the name of cost cutting will influence the customer experience: A short-term savings is not worth sacrificing long-term loyalty."

A Call Center Is the New Touch Point with Customers

Contact centers, commonly known as call centers have become the touch point for customers and business. These contact centers have grown from simple telephone sales to full customer service organizations. From billing issues and quote requests to full sales teams, the call center has delivered on the promise of lower overall costs to many businesses.

Call Centers, from a practical standpoint are actually a technology center that can be used for many things. These include:

Direct telephone answering. Customers call into the center with specific issues or problems.

Support Calls. Any technological product that needs technical support are now using call centers.

Outbound Calling: Calls to existing customers can be placed throughout the world from a centralized contact center.

Outbound Pre-Sales: Prospect calling to develop potential sales opportunities

Quotes: Customers can call in for rate quotes on products

Sales: Handling sales generated from a direct mailing, television or other advertising program

Email: Many call centers now offer direct email processing. Customers can email for specific problems or questions and have them answered usually within 24 hours.

IVR: Interactive Voice Response. Customer interaction with a computer system to obtain information or route the call to the correct department.

The opportunities for a business to benefit from a call center operation are only limited by their imagination. Contact centers are constantly being upgraded with the latest in technology. A good example is the recent growth in the use of voice over Internet protocol or VOIP. This is telephone service over the web.

One of the biggest technological features of many call centers is the predictive dialer. The technology behind a dialer is used for outbound calls like cold calling or pre-sales offerings. Instead of having individual employee-agents dialing numbers, the predictive dialer can manage the number of calls being made at any given point in time and adjust based on the number of available people to accept the call.

This tool is a call management system that is based on logic rules to deliver maximum efficiency.

A Predictive Dialer Can:

Can make and manage hundreds of calls at a time.

Has the ability to monitor the number of agents available to take a call

Can detect call status and route the call based on that status. Busy signals get called again, bad numbers are flagged or removed, a live person is auto routed to an agent, etc.

Auto adjusts the number of calls being dialed based on when an agent is expected to be free to accept the call. The predictive dialer is programmed with basic rules that determine the number of calls being made at any one time. The idea is to have everyone on the phone all the time but also have the process appear seamless to any potential customer. More agents available = more calls. Fewer agents available = less calls.

To much time between calls and the call center cost per call go up, increasing the operating expenses. To little time and the potential customer is held up and is likely to end the call without hearing the offer. Many of the newer predictive dialers actually can learn and adjust the original rules based on how the specific call center is operating. Overall, the call center has made customer support and customer relationship management easier, cheaper and faster.

Answering Service & Call Center Hardware

Here are a few of the leaders in answering service and call center equipment.

AMTELCO

AMTELCO has been a leading provider of customized call center innovations for more than 25 years. With a strong background in the telephone answering service industry, AMTELCO’s primary focus is to design systems that offer cutting-edge technology, which reduces labor costs and increases profitability. Today, AMTELCO’s specialized Call Center Innovations are recognized throughout the industry for improving customer service with straight-forward procedures and trouble-free system maintenance.

AMTELCO is a trusted name in call center communication systems, software applications and XDS technologies for call centers, contact centers, healthcare facilities, higher education facilities, executive suites and developers.

AMTELCO’s award-winning Infinity system is one of the most reliable and profitable pieces of call center equipment on the market. Infinity provides call centers with tools like Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), voice processing, text messaging, PBX capabilities and digital switching to transform businesses into specialized customer resource centers.

In addition to call center systems, AMTELCO offers eCreator, a sophisticated custom web-based scripting application, web-based hosted services and other wireless applications. AMTELCO also designs, manufactures and markets a wide variety of PC, PCI and CompactPCI switching boards to specialized computer-based development companies throughout the world.

Mr. Curtin and AMTELCO have received more than fifteen U.S. patents for telephone switching devices. Today, AMTELCO equipment is in operation in all 50 of the United States and in more than 20 foreign countries.

Call Center Intelligence

There is a plethora of technology solutions needed to run a call center today. Call center technology can vary widely, based on the database platforms, vendor offerings and business requirements. But most call center technology packages will feature five core components.

An automatic call distribution software package (ACD) helps to route your customer calls to the appropriate call center associates. This software effectively allocates your incoming calls based on your pre-defined parameters. Choices can include the next available representative, or the group serving a certain type of request.

Often, the automatic call distribution software will route calls based on your integrated voice response (IVR) system. This software provides the automated menu selections that customers often find annoying. “Press one for English“, or “Press two if you’d like an automated balance on your account” are two examples of the types of menu options that these systems offer your inbound customers.

These two components, while not being always the most popular with your customers, are essential to running a cost effective, efficient call center. Together, these packages eliminate the need for live associates to answer each call and transfer them to the appropriate agent. Ivy’s can also be linked to your database in order to provide automated responses to basic, routine requests, like the last five checks cleared, or a confirmation of a scheduled service call.

The third component of a modern call center software system is predictive dialer software. Although most common in outbound calling centers, this package can be set up in either the hardware or software. Software applications are generally less expensive and more flexible, although both are fairly common. The predictive dialer automatically calls phone numbers that are stored in a computer database. Often, these numbers represent existing customer’s contact information, or telephone numbers purchased for marketing purposes. Most packages will identify and eliminate disconnected numbers, retry busy signals and calls that connect with an answering machine.

Of course, for all of the data being used and collected by your call center, you’ll need a good, adaptable database. Although often the least noticeable aspect of call center technology, it is the most important, with the marketing and customer service efforts of the center relying on the information it provides. The information contained in the database should be easy to access and sort, and the database should be reliable as well. Import and export functionality are also crucial, and data conversions (mostly from clients’ formats) should be straightforward and problem free.

Of course, your call center should also have powerful reporting capabilities. Many of the database packages include pre-written reporting functions, but an external reporting package may also be necessary to obtain the information you and your client need in the format required.

Setting up and running your call center need not be confusing or difficult. Include an automatic call distributor, an integrated voice response system, a predictive dialer and a good database package with flexible reporting capabilities and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Customer satisfaction falls despite call center efforts

A focus on the customer experience over the past year is probably the cause of a significant drop in customer satisfaction levels in the contact center, according to a report issued this week.

The Global Contact Center Benchmarking report found that customer satisfaction levels dropped from 82% last year to 68%. However, that might be a good thing, according to Cara Diamond, editor of the report.

"We think it's not so much because customers are not happy, but because contact centers are doing a better job of measuring satisfaction," she said. "They're more realistic and better at understanding scores. People are paying more attention to analytics, recorded calls and automated survey options. It's a positive for the industry. It shows they're focusing on the customer experience and doing things that will make a difference."

Conducted by Dimension Data plc, a Hauppauge, N.Y.-based IT services firm, the report surveyed 403 contact centers across the globe. This was the tenth year the organization issued its report and, on top of the drop in satisfaction levels, there were some other major changes from last year.

"There was a big jump, unfortunately downwards, in the rate of first-call resolution," Daemon said. "A lot of people measure first-call resolution as a whole. That takes into account all the transfers, bumping callers from one agent to another or [to another] site."

First-call resolution on an agent level -- that is having the issue resolved by the initial agent -- dropped from 87% to 70% this year.

"While people are focused on first-call resolution, there's been quite a lot of effort to look at it as a whole," DeMint said. "Perhaps the next wave is to concentrate on the once-and-done philosophy. It's important having business rules in place, identifying who the caller is, who the best agent is, and all the routing strategies."

Internet protocol (IP) continues to be a major issue for contact centers as well. More than 60% reported they have IP-based PBX/ACDs, up from 50% last year.

"The path to IP is something contact centers continue to be walking down," Dumont said. "The top reason people give is not actually cost savings, but around the flexibility of their architecture, which says a lot of things about the way they're making decisions. They're probably trying to tie in with a broader enterprise technology strategy."

According to the report, 69% chose IP because of the flexibility of its architecture. In addition, 60% of contact centers have an architecture separate from the wider enterprise.

Bringing Call Centers Home: Breaking Away from Traditional Call Centers

When you hear the words "call center" you automatically envision a big open room full of computers, desks and people with headsets talking. You think of a customer service department or a support line. In today's time though there's a new way to see call centers and it's quite there's a new way to see call centers and it's quite different. It's a mom at home with her two children playing in the other room while she is assisting a customer with their order. It's a dad in his home office helping a person with their computer issues. Working at home is an American dream and with today's technology it's more possible than ever. There are at least 30 U.S. Companies that are hiring at home call center agents. That's right. American Infomercial Companies and Customer Service Departments have finally realized that although outsourcing calls overseas is cheaper it's not cost-effective. Mainly because most Americans will hang up on a foreigner and not call back to order the product they wanted. The main reasons of a lost sale are that they can't understand the foreigner or they just don't trust them with their credit card information. On the other hand, those same people if they get an American will most of the time place the order.
American Call Centers have been thing of the past because it's just not cost-effective. You have to have a large facility, buy all the equipment (computers, headsets, servers), and then hire employees on an hourly basis. It never pays for itself. You don't have quality agents either. Most of the people are there to just a get a check and don't care if they get fired or do a good job. It's hard to even to keep a full staff with all the people that quit or are fired everyday. It's not a good situation for anyone involved.

Call Center Pakistan

We at Call Center Pakistan believe in the organization wide mantra of "Quality Drives Performance"

Call Center

Pakistan

is always striving to set new standards for quality by maintaining the perfect balance of world class technological resources, best systems and a highly professional team to run them. We understand that nothing is more essential to ensure customer delight than quality.

That's why at Call Center

Pakistan

we have established company- wide practices, including :

» Recording all communication with our customers including voice, email, live chat, and correspondence.

» We ensure timely reporting to track and improve departmental quality performance.

» We understand that ensuring world-class quality is a continuous process therefore we have periodic evaluation, documentation, associate feedback, and follow-up training exercises related to contact monitoring sessions.

» We encourage feedback from both our clients as well as their customers to help us review the quality of customer care professionals. This feedback is also instrumental in reviewing quality of service at the corporate, operation center, and departmental levels at Call Center

Pakistan

» Our commitment to ensure service quality may be gauged from the fact - the supervisor:agent ratio is as high as 1:7 depending on the service as against the general accepted industry ratio of 1:13.

» We have developed well-structured call escalation processes to handle more challenging and technical customer requests.

Call Center

Pakistan

functions efficiently as your brand ambassador and offer personalized service to your customers through our well-trained Customer Service Representatives.

Call Center Pakistan Inbound Call Centre offer communication services specifically designed to maximize the efficiency of your direct marketing efforts or to be a part of your technical support team. We work together with you as a partner building a strong, successful long-lasting relationship with your customers

Benefits of Inbound Call Centre Outsourcing

Increased sales and profits

Reduced costs per sale

Maximum phone productivity

Increased number of appointments

Increased customer base

Increased lead generation

Higher number of qualified leads

Canada's Call Center Industry Is Booming

When Cendant first set up in St. John, New Brunswick, three years ago, it was opening a satellite operation to handle its Canadian call volume.

"This summer we will have some 500 to 550 agents at our St. John's center," said Director of Operations Margo Beckwith-Byrne. "We have found that we can practically turn on a dime and get things going very quickly to pick up extra call volume from the U.S. We just can't hire as fast in the U.S."

Beckwith-Byrne credits the NB Tel team for its quick response time.

"They never say 'You can't do that,'" she said.

New Brunswick was the first Canadian province to pursue call centers aggressively and has reaped hand-some benefits.

Ciliate, a health information management provider, and Genesis Telecommunications Laboratories of San Francisco, are just two of the companies that have added their names to a growing list. The story of Cendant is typical of the level of success enjoyed by U.S. centers in New Brunswick.

Cendant operates 70 call centers worldwide and services brands including Days Inn, Ramada, Howard Johnson, Travelodge, Avis, Century 21 and Coldwell Banker for its franchisees.

Call centers seem to be a natural fit when one considers Canada's strengths: a long-standing reputation in the field of telecommunications with infrastructure second to none; strong performance in information technology with graduates sought after the world over; and to boot, a significant cost advantage on all counts, further reinforced by a favorable currency exchange.

However, Canada's main attraction for call centers could well be its people: well educated, multilingual, productive and available. Who would think high unemployment could actually become a trump card?

All 10 Canadian provinces are vying for a piece of the action and have all met with some measure of success.

Qualities of a Successful Call Center Supervisor

We compiled this list after conducting and researching several Call Center studies. The responses were taken from multiple interviews with Call Center representatives and Call Center supervisors then paraphrased. This list can be used as a guideline for Call Center Honest and ethical

Good communicator about performance expectations in all areas of work

Excellent Listener uses empathy and compassion

Provides relevant and developmental feedback (both when things are going well and when improvements are needed) to individuals in timely and meaningful manner.

Everyone has conflicts with other people from time to time; at work, at home, with our friends. Any time we spend a lot of time with people, eventually we bash heads. With our good friends we work through it. With people we dislike, we often just walk away.

But when the conflict happens at work, the walk away option is suddenly taken away. Of course you can walk away from the immediate situation, but the option to never work it out is not a realistic one. So when conflict arises, take a deep breath, and start your way down these five steps to conflict resolution.

The # 1 Call Center Conferences Is Back!

The 4th Annual Call Center Summit is the fastest growing call center conference providing tactical strategies for improving call center performance and ROI. Four CEOs and 30 award winning industry experts will show you their strategies for retaining customers, leveraging technology, improving agent productivity, cutting costs, and linking each result to the company bottom line. The 4th Annual Call Center Summit will prepare you with the latest information to move your call center forward.

3 Targeted Tracks on: People Management, Tools & Technology, Measurements and Strategic Performance

2 extended site tours inside Contact Centers of America and Disney Destinations

2 new practitioner led workshops

Strategic Takeaways for improving FCR, utilizing speech analytics, benchmarking with Net promoter score, reducing customer churn, improving agent satisfaction

Views on the growth in Australian Call Canters.

Before September 1996 the Australian Call Centre industry was small and dominated by a selected few industries- telecommunications, credit cards, airlines and car-hire & taxi companies. As part of trade liberalisations the Howard Government removed import restrictions on Telecommunication Equipment. This rule had been established to protect local producers of such equipment, and required that any imports must have a 40% local content. According to sources in Canberra this rule had been implemented in the 60's to protect Telecom Australia and its preferred suppliers ( NEC, Ericsson, Nortel to name a few) and to create and protect Australian jobs. Australia then had maybe 800 call centres with possibly 10,000 employees. The technology was really Stone Age dominated by one major vendor Telstra. I have succeeded in locating two call centres with imported ACDs at that time, Qantas Reservation and Silvertop Taxi's in Melbourne.

The trade liberalisation resulted in the arrival of major independent vendors Lucent Technology, Genesys, Aspect, IBM & HP all interested in developing the dormant Call Centre Market. By mid 1997 the large US Outsource Call Centre companies began buying up existing Telemarketing & Call Centre service agencies and today we have Sitel, Excel, Omnicom & The Index Group. Add to that list of 100's of smaller software and CTI vendors who arrived less noticed. Since 1996 the number of Call Centres have exploded from an estimated 800 to 5-6000 sites and employment has grown from probably 10,000 to closer to 100,000.

All because Senator Alston succeeded in removing a trade barrier? We're some, who are happy, then Minister for Industry John Moore didn't railroad that proposal (as he did with the import tariffs on cars)

At the same time politically on all levels of Government a sustained push to provide better service levels at lower cost dominated the agenda with some remarkable results. The Agency ( now known as Centreline), the ATO Customer Service Centres, The Brisbane City Council Call Centre are some of noteworthy initiatives. State sponsored Call Centre Development Offices was set up to attract call centres. Best known are the efforts of the SA & Tasmanian Local Government. Local councils got in on the act- Bendigo,Wollongong, Gold Coast & Hunter Valley were noticeable.

New Call Center to Enhance American Euro copter’s Commitment to Customer Service Excellence

Anaheim, Heli-Expo 2009 - American Eurocopter will introduce a new state-of-the-art call service center at the company’s Grand Prairie, Texas, headquarters, providing the centerpiece for its long-term commitment to enhanced customer services.

The call center’s fast-paced construction schedule will lead to its completion and introduction in the second quarter of this year. This facility is to be staffed by supply and service specialists who will be hired based on their helicopter industry experience and aviation skills, joining American Eurocopter’s already strong and experienced team.

The call center is one element in American Eurocopter’s improved customer services offer, which includes an organizational change combining its marketing, sales and customer support into a single streamlined operation. This will allow the new organization to support products from sales and delivery through their full service life.

“Customer support excellence requires relentless attention and investment,” said American Eurocopter President & CEO Marc Paganini. “As the premier helicopter supplier in the U.S. market, we are positioning ourselves to be number one in support for the future as well.” The call center’s construction follows American Eurocopter’s launch of its Customer Service, Support and Satisfaction (CS3) initiative last November, which includes increasing staffing levels, strengthening its logistics infrastructure, and upgrading the tools required for rapid and positive customer response.

“American Eurocopter is fully focused on enhancing its overall customer service, and the new call center will be on the front lines in managing our operators’ most important requirements – both technical and non-technical,” said Larry Roberts, American Eurocopter’s Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Customer Support.

About American Eurocopter

American Eurocopter is the U.S. subsidiary of Eurocopter, the largest helicopter manufacturer in the world, and EADS North America Holdings, the North American operations of EADS, the second largest aerospace and defense company in the world. American Eurocopter is a helicopter manufacturer and the company markets, sells and supports the broadest range of civil and para-public helicopters offered by any manufacturer. The product line represents the most cost-effective, technologically-advanced helicopters, ranging from light single to heavy twin, serving all markets and missions. American Eurocopter's headquarters and main facility are in Grand Prairie, TX, with a large manufacturing and production facility in Columbus, MS and its West Coast Regional Support Facility in Long Beach, CA.

5 Causes of Call-Center Agent Churn — and How to Beat Them

Agent churn is the bane of call centers. Studies show that the average call center CSR (customer support representative) lasts about six months, while call centers have a 40 percent average annual turnover rate.

Churn is expensive. The Robert Francis Group Inc. estimated that replacing an agent costs between $10,000 and $15,000, conservatively. The group's report on call-center turnover noted that at the lower figure, a 25 percent turnover costs a call center with 100 agents $250,000 per year. That doesn't include the biggest costs — reduced customer satisfaction and business because of inexperienced CSRs.

How do companies combat call-center churn? Money is important, of course. The RFG report suggested making sure the salary you offer is at least in the 75th percentile for similar jobs in your area.

However, money is far from the only consideration in keeping agents. In fact, when it comes to retaining — as opposed to hiring— call-center agents, money falls behind other considerations. Surveys have found that while factors such as pay and location are the main reasons for taking a call-center job, other reasons, especially co-workers, are more important when deciding to leave.

Global or National? An International Comparison of Call Centre’s

In spite of globalization, working conditions in call centers around the world are still governed by national regulations. That was the result of a major study supported by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, which looked at 2,400 call centers in 17 countries. As a follow-up to this study, the FWF is now funding further international analyses and case studies that will compare conditions in Austrian call centres with those in other countries.

Throughout the world, the number of call centres is growing. These facilities offer companies aiming to achieve effective forms of customer care a great deal of flexibility. Working conditions are often atypical with staff being employed on a temporary or freelance basis, for example, and cutting-edge technologies mean that operations can easily be outsourced to other locations, at home or abroad.

The employment conditions in call centres throughout the world have now been investigated as part of the Global Call Center Industry Project, coordinated by Cornell University (USA), the Institute of Work Psychology (UK) and FORBA (the Working Life Research Centre, Austria). This international project set out to analyse whether the global spread of call centres is being accompanied by a growing convergence in working conditions. Or whether the opposite is the case, i.e. whether working conditions at these call centres continue to be shaped by national standards and rules. The study has found that call centres are perhaps not as "global" as one might assume. For example, working conditions at call centres in coordinated market economies such as Austria, Germany and Denmark are significantly better than in liberal market economies such as the UK and USA.

CALL CENTER CONFERENCE TO TACKLE GLOBAL ECONOMIC IMPACT

Some of the biggest names in the call center industry are expected to discuss critical issues about the economy and the industry during the upcoming CCAP Annual Call Center Conference & Expo 2008 in a CEO panel discussion entitled, “Call Center CEOs: Rising to the Challenges of the New Global Economy.”

These country managers and chief executives represent some of the member companies of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP), and include Benedict Hernandez of eTelecare, Dan Reyes of Sitel, Marife Zamora of Convergys, Vic Endaya of Advanced Contact Solutions, Bong Borja of PeopleSupport, Maulik Parekh of TeleTech, John Langford of ICT Group, Beaver Lopez of PacificHub, and Raffy David of Pilipinas Teleserv, among others.

They will share their experience operating in the Philippines, including challenges, opportunities, and growth plans. They will also assess global competition from emerging call center destinations as well as the impact of the latest economic issues such as the forex fluctuations, increasing inflation, the US recession, etc.

To further address these issues during the two-day event, the CCAP Annual Call Center Conference & Expo 2008 will also feature keynote addresses from four high-profile personalities: Senate President Manny Villar, Senate Majority Floor Leader Francis Pangilinan, former NEDA (National Economic Development Authority) secretary Felipe Medalla, and CICT (Commission on Information and Communication Technology) secretary Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III.

“This is going to be the hottest lineup of speakers and panelists we have ever gathered for our annual conference,” says Raffy David, head of the CCAP Membership and Events Committee.

Two other panel discussions during the plenary session also deal with socio-economic issues. The “Call Center Clients: The Philippine Scorecard” panel features clients of third-party contact centers who will share their experience outsourcing to the Philippines in comparison with other countries. The “Support Sectors: The New 24/7 Economy and its Ripple Effects” panel will have various representatives from the food, telco, real estate, and IT sectors talk about the call center market as well as the industry’s impact in their revenues and operations. A special interest group is also scheduled with members of the academe, which will discuss demand and supply trends and issues as well as potential industry-academe alliances and initiatives.

“This year is by far the most ambitious and comprehensive for the two-day flagship convention, exhibit, and job fair of CCAP,” notes David. The event will be held this July 23-24, 2008 at a new venue – the SMXConvention Center, Mall of Asia Complex, Pasay City. Now on its fourth successful run, it is the annual gathering of executives, managers, supervisors, and agents of outsource and in-house contact centers.

The CCAP Annual Call Center Conference & Expo 2008 is already on its fourth run and has drawn thousands of participants every year. Conference fees are P8,000 (instead of P10,000) for a Two-Day Passand P5,000 (instead of P6,000) for a One-Day Pass if registered before July 22. Group discounts are also available. Other special rates apply to CCAP members. Fees include seminar materials, snacks, lunch, and certificate of participation.

Alaska Airlines opens new Phoenix reservations call centre

A new reservations call centre has been opened in south Phoenix, Arizona, USA by Alaska Airlines, replacing its Tempe, Arizona facility, which has been in operation since 1989.

Alaska Airlines said it invested USD5m to develop the 30,000 square foot leased facility into its new centre, which serves customers calling its (800) ALASKAAIR reservations phone line, elite-level frequent fliers and Spanish-speaking customers.

According to Alaska Airlines, the centre, which employs 270 agents including 30 bilingual employees, demonstrates its commitment to its reservations sales agents based in Phoenix.

The airline claimed the centre holds a critical role in serving the airline's Spanish-speaking customers in the language of their choice and confirmed its aim to double the number of bilingual agents by the end of this year.