"¿Puedes ayudarme, por favor?"
Customer service when Spanish isn't your first language
Customer service can be a beast when you don’t fluently speak the language of the country you reside in.
I’m a frequent Amazon user. At first, I didn’t schedule deliveries to our apartment. Instead, I had them delivered to a locker a few blocks from our building because I couldn’t wrap my head around speaking enough Spanish to communicate with the courier.
Soon enough, with reassurances from other Americans living in Spain, I finally got brave enough to start receiving deliveries at home. Most of the time, they hand over the package, ask for your NIE (identification number) if they need it, and they’re done–off to deliver another package. Some of the delivery drivers even speak some English and are eager to practice it on me.
Amazon doesn’t change much from country to country. You don’t even need to open a new account if you don’t want to. You can change the country of your account. (Full disclosure: I opened a new Amazon account just for Spain. I have a Kindle, my daughter has a Kindle, and an Amazon customer service associate told me it would change the availability of books for us.)
As with most things in life, all of this runs smoothly–until it doesn’t.
I recently experienced my first customer service hiccup when Amazon canceled an order I had placed for new headphones. So I did what anyone does: I hopped onto Amazon’s chat, and to my surprise, it defaulted to English. Yay! I thought. This will be easy.
Not so fast, Jen.
The rep told me the Spanish team would have to assist me. Okay, great, I can handle that.
One problem: The Spanish rep noticed that I’d been chatting in English. He asked if I’d prefer to continue in English, and I said yes. Oops! Back to another rep in English, who again informed me that the Spanish team would have to help me. But, he said, you will need to continue the conversation in Spanish, or they will send you back to this team again. “Use Google Translate,” he said when I told him I don’t speak much Spanish.
Knowing I wasn’t getting out of this loop without the Spanish conversation, I whipped out my phone and pointed it at my laptop for translation when the rep came online. Finally, we were getting somewhere, but only after I declined to continue the conversation in English.
Living in a new country and learning a new language requires constant adaptation. Sometimes, it’s easier than others. I wasted almost 30 minutes before I could get to the root of the issue and solve it. If I’d known from the start that I needed to translate to Spanish, I could’ve saved myself a whole lot of headache.
This move continues to teach me empathy. While I am naturally empathetic, it is eye-opening to have firsthand experiences that someone moving to the U.S. must have when they don’t speak the language or understand the cultural nuances. Will has had his own recent experiences with this concept in a different setting.
It is hard to live in a new country. It is hard to learn a new language. But it is also gratifying, and we learn so much about ourselves and others as we navigate daily life in Spain.