Today, the author writes, business can be conducted in English almost anywhere in the developed world, possibly excepting Japan. But when you build or grow a global consumer-facing business, you must speak the language of your customers, wherever they are. Booking.com, the Priceline Group’s largest global business, strives to meet that goal by employing people who can answer calls in 42 languages. Although Booking.com is a digital company that facilitates online reservations, about 20% of its customers wind up calling for some other reason. Even though many of them are multilingual, when it comes to their personal travel, they want to speak in their native language.
When Huston took the reins, in 2011, the company was relatively small, with a hard-to-find customer service number. Now it has 6,000 full-time customer service employees, all of whom speak fluent English plus at least one other language; many speak three or four. When planning how to staff call centers, the company must consider cultural factors (for instance, people in emerging markets such as Brazil and China tend to call more frequently) and nuances (Americans tend to not like speaking with a rep who has a British accent, and vice versa). For future centers, it has prioritized major cities for either their depth in major languages (Tokyo, Shanghai) or their breadth of languages (London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona). Booking.com is now, the author writes, “the largest online accommodations platform in the world, by almost any measure,” and has been rated “one of the most international websites on the planet.”
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.
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