Interesting Instance of Multilingual Customer Service ...

At DVH, the focus is always on differentiating us on the basis of expert service and support.

Here are a few instances of customer service which we had never planned for, but yet.. here is the very first which had us stumped!

Scenario: We recieve a long support ticket in the 2nd week of operations... It looked urgent and had lots of data as well, but the trouble was, it was in Italian!!
I raised up the IRC to see if some of my casual European aquantances were awake at that time.. no success there...

In the meanwhile, i received yet another follow up response to the same ticket, making us more conscious that some one needed urgent support..

Ah! the bulb flashed in the top floor.. thought about Babelfish.
http://babelfish.altavista.com
Copied the support ticket content over there, converted it from Italian to English and got some garbled english text.. but at least could make sense of it in bits and pieces.

Typed the response in the same text box again, and converted it back to Italian, but that sure looked crazy.. So ended up replying in English to the support ticket. That solved the issue and the ticket was closed.

The Italian webmaster was very courteous, and i always kept on wondering what he must be thinking of us after that..... Since the fact that we are replying implies that someone over here at DVH knew Italian, (but 'that Italian DVH fellow' was replying in english for some funny reason). Was that a good impression that we made upon him, or the other way round??

Take-away-from-the-incident: Now all the DVH staff has babelfish form altavista bookmarked and we do try our best to provide multilingual support..

Caveat: The next time you send anything in Chinese or Russian, and you get a garbled reply in the same language.. you know which babelfish to blame :)