We’ve been growing now for 6 years and during this, our team has also grown a lot. As we offer car rental comparison for people all around the world it means we also need customer support for many different languages.
At the moment we have team members who speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, Polish and Finnish. During these years we’ve worked with amazing people from almost every continent.
We want to share with you what it’s like working in a multicultural team:
1) Different strengths
Our colleague from Colombia is amazingly patient with even the most stubborn customers. Our co-worker from Latvia can respond to 3 times more emails than anybody else. Our CEO from the United Kingdom has taught us that timezones don’t distance people. Together we make an awesome team where we can all put our talents to use.
2)Multicultural colleagues make it easier to understand multicultural customers
As an international car rental broker, we have customers from all around the world. We have learned that Finnish people like really short and direct responses while French people really like to spend some time on the phone. It’s much easier to understand the nuances of different cultures if you have someone who explains them right next to you.
3)Testing work processes and manuals with different work cultures
Optimizing our processes to be understood by everyone means that our onboarding process is now fast and the customer support team members are all experts.
4) Sadly, we’ve learned how close-minded people can still be in 2021
We have sadly had quite many cases of customers demanding to speak with a representative from their own nation. We’ve heard racial slurs and all sorts of assumptions about ourselves and our colleagues. We believe that if a person is an expert, it doesn’t matter what their race or nationality is. Whether our customer support representative is from Finland, Poland, the UK, or from Mars, they will still do their best to help you.
5) It’s amazing how many languages a single person can speak!
Jelena, how?
(she speaks about 7 languages)
We are glad to be working in an international company. We believe that different cultures can co-exist and uplift each other. We hope to keep growing and to keep learning.
Originally posted on LinkedIn
