1. Does the caller have to press a key?
“Press 2 for Spanish” is a menu, not a bilingual receptionist. Every menu loses some callers before anyone says hello, and it assumes they speak one of the two languages on offer. Ask whether the service simply answers in whatever language the caller opens with. Ours does: nobody presses anything, and it recognises more than twenty languages.
2. What happens when they switch mid-call?
In a family business this is the normal case, not the edge case: a mother books in French and hands the phone to her son, who asks a question in Cantonese. A service with a Spanish line and an English line cannot follow that — the call is already on one of them. Ours follows the caller sentence by sentence. Across the 17 complete calls on our site, callers change language 69 times, and you can play every one.
3. What language is the confirmation text in?
The call is half the job. If the booking confirmation arrives in English to someone who booked in Portuguese, the code they need to cancel or change is in a language they did not use. Ask what languages the texts go out in. Ours go out in eight — English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Mandarin and Cantonese — in whichever of those the caller actually spoke; anything else gets English.
4. Does “Chinese” mean Mandarin only?
Mandarin and Cantonese are written with the same characters and spoken very differently. A service that treats them as one language tends to answer a Cantonese caller in Mandarin — which, for many of them, is the language they least want to be pushed into. Ask how it tells them apart. We treat Cantonese as its own language, not a variant of Mandarin. Cantonese is also the hardest to get right in speech, so listen to the Cantonese lines in the recordings before you rely on it.
5. Does bilingual cost extra?
Human answering services often charge more for a bilingual agent, or only staff one at certain hours. Ask whether a Spanish call at 2am costs the same and is answered the same as an English call at noon. Ours does not price by language: $199 a month with 400 minutes included, whatever language those minutes are in.
What it will not do
It will not translate the call for you as it happens, and it does not keep audio — you get a written transcript afterwards, in the language that was spoken. If you need a human interpreter on the line, for medical or legal conversations especially, that is a different service and you should buy that one.