Thirteen years ago, when DEMCO’s Galen Dunbar answered calls at the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, co-op’s contact center, “it would be very rare that we would receive a Spanish-speaking call.”

But as the Spanish-speaking population in Baton Rouge has almost doubled since 2010, according to U.S. Census data, “it’s now quite common,” said Dunbar, the co-op’s chief member services officer.

It’s a familiar scene playing out at many co-ops in which non-English-speaking members call or walk in with billing, service or outage questions. Co-ops are meeting that demand in several ways, including hiring more bilingual employees and, increasingly, accessing support from the Cooperative Response Center, a national 24/7 contact center serving more than 400 electric co-ops.

CRC has seen significant growth in translation services—three-way calls between an interpreter, co-op employee and member. That’s on top of other offerings, such as an auto-attendant phone feature with queues for different languages and an interactive voice response phone system allowing members to record their outage using automation.

“We’re handling translation calls on a daily basis when prior to 2017 we didn’t,” said Dan Otteson, vice president of marketing and membership at CRC, based in Austin, Minnesota. “It’s apparent to us that co-ops are more concerned about this than they were in past decades.”

By far, Spanish is the most often-encountered language, and over the years, CRC has ramped up services considerably. Nearly 20% of CRC’s 162 in-bound call agents are fluent in Spanish and a 24/7 Spanish-language call queue is also available.

Co-ops also have requested help for translation in other languages, including Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Mandarin, French and Korean. For those calls, CRC dispatches a third-party interpreter.

“If there’s a high concentration of Spanish speakers in an area, those co-ops usually hire that bilingual talent themselves, and they don’t need us as much,” Otteson said. “What makes us especially valuable is when the need comes up unexpectedly.”

When those moments do arise, a translation “hotline” connects a co-op employee, member and CRC call agent. “So if there’s a storm and outages at 3 a.m., and a member speaks only, say, Portuguese, we can help,” Otteson said.

CRC began its three-way translation service in 2017, Otteson said, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture doubled down on enforcement of its nondiscrimination statement, which, in part, requires borrowers to provide accommodations for non-English speakers.

DEMCO, a CRC member, is also helping meet evolving member expectations with the help of two bilingual employees in its member service department.

Non-English speakers are pleasantly surprised “when they arrive expecting language barriers to be a challenge. Their concerns are quickly eased when they discover that we have effective solutions in place to ensure they receive a valuable experience,” said Dunbar.

At North Carolina’s Four County EMC, five of the 12 member service reps speak Spanish, and another two employees can provide backup if needed. The Burgaw-based co-op has seen a rising need for Spanish-speaking staff, said Greg Sager, vice president of member services.

“It’s imperative to our business to have them on the team,” he said.