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.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]