Priceline’s CEO on Creating an In-House Multilingual Customer Service Operation

Maarten Kools When I was in high school, some 30 years ago, I studied abroad for two years in a small Italian village where no one spoke English. Even when I went to a city, such as Venice, I rarely found people who spoke my native language. That has changed completely. You can do business in English almost anywhere in the developed world, with the possible exception of Japan. But in a global consumer-facing business, there’s no question that you must speak the language of your customers, wherever they are. At Booking.com, The Priceline Group’s largest global business (it operates in more than 220 countries and territories), we work hard to meet that goal by employing people who can answer calls in dozens of languages. Even though we’re designed to facilitate online reservations, travelers call us for all sorts of reasons. Travel is a big-ticket item, and people want to get it right. Sometimes they want to confirm the details, or they don’t realize they can make changes online. Sometimes they simply want to talk to a human being. Travel is also logistics-intensive, which means things can, and do, go wrong. A hotel is overbooked, or a volcano in Iceland has grounded flights. Today about 20% of our customers wind up speaking with us on the phone for some reason. Even though many of them are multilingual, when it comes to their personal travel, they want to speak in their native language. It’s challenging to ensure that they can. But unlike a lot of other internet companies, we don’t treat customer service as a cost center. We make the phone number accessible on our website, and we don’t outsource customer service to save money. We apply the same rigorous hiring standards in that department as in any other function. We strongly believe that our service centers are a critical part of the customer experience and that if something goes wrong and we’re able to fix it, we’ll have that customer for life. And our data confirms that. The Path to The Priceline Group I grew up in Canada, where I spoke English at home. I learned French as well as Italian when I was a teenager, and after college I worked in the Canadian government, where my boss was from Quebec and would speak to me only in French. After graduating from Harvard Business School, I joined McKinsey & Company. As a consultant, I learned that I aspired to lead a company and that I prefer B2C businesses over B2B businesses. I understand how consumers interact with brands, and I like being able to use the products myself. (I even like handling customer complaints directly, which I still do.) While I was working for McKinsey in Seattle, I saw Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, give a speech. I found him and his company very compelling. At that time a lot of McKinsey people were quitting to join dot-coms; I joined a coffee company instead. People thought I was crazy. I spent five years at Starbucks working on new ventures and branded products. I led the acquisition of Tazo tea, helped launch the Starbucks music program, arranged to put Wi-Fi in all our stores, and created the Starbucks Card payments platform. Through the Wi-Fi project, I got to know Steve Ballmer and his colleagues at Microsoft. They recruited me, and I wound up working there in a variety of roles, eventually becoming the CEO of Microsoft Japan. Microsoft is where I learned to run a scaled operation. I lived in Tokyo for three years. Some of my direct reports spoke a bit of English, but they preferred to speak Japanese, so I had a translator with me much of the time. Two levels below me, pretty much no one spoke English. That was my first experience with language barriers as a management challenge. One day in 2011, at a hockey game in Vancouver, I received a call from a recruiter. She wanted me to consider a job running Booking.com, which she said was a big internet travel company based in Amsterdam. I told her I’d never heard of it. She said it was part of The Priceline Group, parent company of the popular North American travel website priceline.com. Like many other people, I associated priceline.com with its name-your-own-price model during the internet bubble of the late 1990s. I’d seen the ads starring William Shatner. I recalled that priceline.com expanded quickly into name-your-own-price groceries, insurance, and gasoline, and that it was hit hard by the internet bust. To be honest, I thought it hadn’t survived. But as it turned out, the company had jettisoned nearly everything except its travel business and done a reverse stock split to stay afloat. Slowly it reinvented itself. If the internet of the 1990s was all about gimmicks and marketing, the internet of the early 2000s was all about the ability to do transactions at scale. When I got home and began researching The Priceline Group, I saw that it owned a suite of sites with that capability: Rentalcars.com and Agoda.com (for hotels in Asia), along with Booking.com and priceline.com. Later we added Kayak for travel search and OpenTable for online restaurant reservations. When I checked its market cap, I was surprised to see that the company was not only bigger than Expedia, but bigger than most e-commerce businesses I knew. It was also very, very global, in large part because of Booking.com. I realized that a B2C company this big, on the internet, that nobody really knew about, offered a unique opportunity to make Booking.com a household name. So my family and I moved to the Netherlands. I became the head of Booking.com in 2011, and in early 2014 I was named president and CEO of The Priceline Group. (I’m still also the CEO of Booking.com.) The job requires me to travel a lot, which helps me empathize with our customers, partners, and frontline employees. Enhanced Service The people who founded Booking.com recognized the importance of great customer service, and they created an incredibly solid foundation. Nevertheless, when I arrived, it was a relatively small operation. We didn’t support every language, and our service was good but not excellent. We lacked a number of systems and processes. The customer service phone number was hard to find on our website. So we began to test changes. One of the first was making the phone number visible on every page. That increased costs a bit, but the impact on loyalty more than compensated. Another important step was figuring out how customers really feel about automated functions on a customer service line. Some people believe that those who get a recording—“Press one to change a reservation,” for example—are typically unhappy. That sounds reasonable; we’ve all had unpleasant experiences with such systems. But we gathered data showing that for simple requests, customers prefer a web-based automated system if it’s well designed (after all, they chose to book on the internet in the first place). That was an important realization, because if we could automate simple requests innovatively, reps would be freed up to spend more time with customers whose problems required human interaction. Today we have 6,000 full-time Booking.com customer service employees, up from about a thousand when I joined. Every one of them speaks fluent English plus at least one other language. Many speak three or four languages, particularly in Europe. I’ve met reps who speak seven or eight. We test fluency, and we pay people a little more for every extra language they speak. We do offer language lessons, but most of our reps come with capabilities already in hand. Altogether, we offer service in 42 languages. We’re constantly testing for languages 43, 44, and 45, but we haven’t yet found a “next” for which there’s specific demand. The breadth of our in-house multilingual operation is unusual. By comparison, the United Nations offers translators for only six of the most popular global languages, and most U.S. companies offer service in just English and Spanish. Among global customer service operations, some very large outsourcing companies operate call centers that can handle a few more languages than our team can, and other large companies make use of “on-demand telephonic interpretation,” whereby they pay for on-call access to freelance translators in case a customer speaks an unusual language. Both approaches can be more cost-effective than ours, but we believe that having our own people take calls in whatever language a customer prefers makes for better service. Finding people who speak all these languages is a challenge. We have just a handful of reps for some of them, such as Icelandic, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Catalan, and not every language is covered all 24 hours. But people who speak uncommon languages usually also speak a more common one, such as English, so we can almost always find someone to take their calls. We also try to think creatively about how to find the right talent in regions where specific language skills may be limited. For instance, finding Portuguese speakers for our Orlando call center was difficult, so our recruiters began advertising at international soccer events at a local stadium and attending Brazilian cultural events. Cultural Nuances When we consider how to staff our phone centers, we think not just about the popularity of languages but also about the cultural factors that will drive demand for reps that speak them. For instance, people in emerging markets such as Brazil and China tend to call more frequently, perhaps because they’re unaccustomed to booking trips solely online. The Dutch (theirs was our second language, after English) call the least. South Americans tend to stay on calls longer, so we may need more reps speaking their languages to avoid keeping people on hold. Another challenge is that there’s a lot of nuance in language. English speakers have probably all talked to a rep at an offshore call center who is difficult to understand, but that’s not what I’m referring to. No matter how fluent the rep, customers in some parts of the world simply don’t like talking to people who aren’t native speakers or don’t get the linguistic details right. The Japanese, for instance, can often tell the difference between a Japanese speaker from Singapore or the United States and one from Japan, and they tend to prefer the latter. Their language has a lot of honorifics, so we offer special training in using them correctly. Americans tend to not like speaking with a rep who has a British accent, and vice versa. Even within the UK, Scots prefer to speak with Scots, the Welsh with the Welsh, and so on. We try to be aware of and manage all such factors when we route calls between centers, to maximize the odds that customers will speak to someone who uses their language the way they prefer. As we scaled up the company, we opened one customer service center in a lower-cost region of the United States. That didn’t work well, because it was very difficult to find local people who were proficient in the languages we needed. We’ve maintained that center, though, because we now have enough American business to keep it busy. For future centers, we have prioritized major cities for either their depth in major languages (Tokyo, Shanghai) or their breadth of languages (London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona). It may seem counterintuitive to locate customer service in big cities, for reasons of both real estate and labor. But we find that the talent is of higher quality, so it’s worth the expense. For instance, we have a customer service center in Seattle, even though it would be much cheaper to operate in Spokane. Because Seattle is a tech hub, we find plenty of trailing spouses and others who can speak three or more languages, love travel, and like to help others. Graceful Translations Today Booking.com is the largest online accommodations platform in the world, by almost any measure. Our conversion rates (from looker to booker) are known to be the highest in the industry, and our loyal customers have very high repeat rates. We have grown almost fourfold in five years, and we’ve been rated one of the most international websites on the planet. A big advantage we have in this line of work is that the company was founded in Amsterdam, a linguistically rich city with a long history of residents inclined to travel. Many people here can speak many languages. My assistant, who is Dutch, speaks five well. She’s not atypical. This aspect affects our corporate culture, particularly by comparison with other internet companies: Except for the largest, they tend to be very U.S. English–centric. They see international growth as something they need for scale, whereas we are international by design. Being global is in our DNA. Along with a deep pool of multilingual talent for our call centers, we have a large group of translators who work on our websites. Most of their translations are done personally, rather than through a software program, because the results are better. If you use a software program to translate something from Chinese to Polish, it will usually translate first from Chinese to English, and then from English to Polish. That extra step, understandably, can lead to lower-quality results. We try to translate directly from the language of origin to the language we want to publish on the site. Someday a Google or Microsoft translation program may become adept enough to help people navigate among languages perfectly, but that’s a daunting idea. I remember talking with Bill Gates about this once during a visit he made to Tokyo when I was working at Microsoft. It was one of his dreams. But most likely it will be years before a computer can do perfect translations. For now, people are vital to the process. Perhaps in 100 years the vast majority of people in the world will speak English, and managing a global consumer-facing company will become easier. But I hope that doesn’t happen. It would be a shame to homogenize the world’s culture. Spending on travel is currently growing twice as fast as global GDP, and it’s not driven by people from Atlanta who are visiting Florida—it’s increasingly international. We want to see places that are very different and people who are very different, and language is a vital part of what creates those differences.

Priceline’s CEO on Creating an In-House Multilingual Customer Service Operation

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