In your query, you can define the collate. (select * from customer where [name] like 'alvarez%' collate Modern_SPanish_CI_AI). You can also change the collate of one fields if you wish, but that has some disadvantages with joins in reporting and how to update your tables.

If the tables are not too big, you could even add typo correction, so if they'd type avlarez it would still find Álvarez. Performance will be an issue if you have a millions of records, but I have done it in a few places.