Deliveroo smashes language barriers with real-time translator

The challenge

Deliveroo provides food delivery in over 200 locations across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, serving customers in dozens of languages. To support their rapid business growth, Deliveroo needed a more robust contact center platform that could scale with them, enabling the customer CareOps team to deliver fast and reliable service from EMEA to APAC.

In addition to scaling with their growing business, Deliveroo wanted a solution that could help them solve a specific customer experience challenge: when contacting customer support during periods of high demand, customers often had to wait for an agent who spoke their language to become available. Wait times were extended even further when agents copy and pasted chats into an online translation service.

Staffing the contact center with more multilingual agents was not a viable option; the company needed a platform to support a real-time translator which would allow customers and agents to easily communicate in different languages.

The solution

In partnership with AWS, TTEC Digital implemented a solution for Deliveroo that could both scale with them and support their translation needs: a powerful contact center platform that supported live chat, with built-in automatic two-way translation. This contact center solution, which relied on AI/ML services such as Amazon Translate, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Lex and Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, allowed customers to message support in their preferred language, and for support agents to read and respond in their own native language. Amazon Connect supports up to five concurrent chat sessions per agent, which allows a single agent to support multiple customer chats in different languages concurrently, and a custom terminology feature allows companies on the platform to ensure that product names and other terms are translated correctly.

TTEC Digital provided the architecture, design, build, training, user acceptance testing (UAT), migration, and go-live support for the contact center migration to the new platform for the CareOps team. The TTEC Digital team brought their extensive Amazon Connect knowledge to accelerate the adoption of Amazon Connect, including cloud development and software development skills for integrations to internal and third-party systems. In addition, they provided leadership with project management to support the different markets and their migration over to the new platform on time and on budget.

The result

Now, when a customer types a question into a chat session, Amazon Translate, which allows agents and customers to select their preferred language from an ever-growing list of more than 70 languages, will automatically translate the message for both parties. For example, if an English-speaking agent received a customer’s incoming message in Spanish, the web chat translation panel would display the customer’s original message next to the English translation. The agent can respond in English and the response will be automatically translated into Spanish.

The benefits of a real-time translator were immediately apparent: the tool helped Deliveroo’s customers, delivery personnel, and restaurant owners talk to each other across language barriers to have delicious meals delivered with minimal effort, leading to a 20% decrease in average handle time and an 83% first call resolution.