Yahoo’s products and services may soon establish a larger following among non-English speakers. This morning, Yahoo promised to introduce new customer care services in nine different languages, with Arabic being a top focus.
The other eight languages are French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, meaning Yahoo’s aiming at some pretty large groups of people. It doesn’t look like the company plans to just roll out some automated email systems, either, promising "world-class customer care" instead.
In an odd twist, IBM will actually handle the operation, though. And it’ll do so out of a call center located in Cairo, Egypt.
Amr Talaat, Country General Manager of IBM Egypt, explained his company’s involvement by stating, "The services delivered from this center will help Yahoo!’s Middle East, North African, and European users benefit from the talent pool and customer care solutions deployed here. It will provide them with best-in-class user experience and customer services that are an industry benchmark."
Dr. Hazem Abdelazim, CEO of Egypt’s Information Technology Industry Development Agency, then added, "Our global offering not only provides reputed multinational companies with a cost-competitive location, but also a location that operates as a multilingual platform for world-class operations."
This could have a significant effect on Yahoo’s popularity. Individuals and businesses should be much less hesitant to use something when they know real help is just an email or a phone call away.