You Need To Offer Multilingual Customer Support. Here’s Why!
- | Amit Shivani
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The most significant benefit of the digital revolution is that your business can now attract the attention of potential customers worldwide, sell products or services to a global audience, and establish yourself as a leading industry brand on a global scale. Does that sound too good to be true? It is not, especially if you cater to your ideal prospects in their language of preference, using multilingual customer service!
Did you know that 86% of customer service center representatives receive calls from customers who do not speak English? Even with a great product, friendly agents, quick responses, and fancy technology, your business might expand globally only if you prioritize translation in customer support. I know what you’re thinking, though – wouldn’t it cost a fortune to hire customer service reps adept at local languages? If your company is expanding fast, how many of them would you hire to assuage customer concerns? How would you justify these overhead costs? But then, you also know that 65% of customers will change to your competitor brand if you don’t provide a quality customer experience.
Hiring local-language agents left and right is not the best solution for your company. It needs to be more scalable, and in most instances, the talent may not be able to speak or understand a second language. This may lead to misunderstandings and customer dissatisfaction. So how do you ensure that you provide the best multilingual customer service and make customers loyal to your brand?
You need a Translation Management System (or TMS). With an efficient TMS, you can cater to customers who speak their native languages in major regions worldwide where the demand for your product or services is huge. One of the primary reasons why 82% of companies do not offer multilingual customer service is that volumes do not justify financial investments. However, you can provide customers with support in their native languages at a much lower cost when it comes to a TMS. That’s a win-win for both your customer and your brand! Most TMS systems provide a multilingual customer care option to help you communicate effectively with your clients. Without hiring multilingual staff, you may customize the customer experience for customers based on their preferred languages, cutting costs dramatically and streamlining your customer care features.
Now, let’s find out what multilingual customer support actually means.
What is multilingual customer support?
Multilingual customer support is customer service offered by a company in various languages as part of the entire customer experience. For clients to communicate their needs and be served with adequate assistance throughout the customer journey, it is essential that businesses overcome the language barrier, and cater to their ideal target audience segments in their native language.
This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, including by working with companies that specialize in multilingual customer care, employing translation software, or hiring staff members who are multilingual themselves.
The customer journey doesn’t just end at their first purchase; it needs to include after-sales customer support, regardless of the language. Following a purchase, a client may have queries regarding the item or their purchase, require assistance utilizing the product or service, wish to return or exchange, or run into some issues.
Building customer loyalty and keeping customers buying from your brand over and over again heavily depends on your ability to support them along the way and make sure they are happy with their purchases. Multilingual customer care guarantees that everyone receives the same level of high-quality assistance, regardless of their language proficiency when your clients are dispersed around the globe.
Why Should You Offer Multilingual Customer Service?
In the modern international marketplace, customer experience is a critical differentiator between you and your competitors. Consumers no longer have a single brand they are devoted to, and are quick to switch brands if they are dissatisfied with the product/ service.
Did you know that acquiring new customers can cost you up to 7 times more than selling to your existing customers? The probability that you will be able to sell to your potential new customers is a meager 5-20%. A majority of businesses continue to ignore this fact and allow themselves to incur significant losses in the process. When operating across markets, your customers are more likely to hunt for an alternative product or service if you don’t offer help in their native tongues.
When you do it right, a multilingual customer support initiative can put you at a considerable advantage, especially compared to your industry competitors. It can benefit you by:
- Helping you better understand customer needs and feedback, which can be instrumental in improving your product or service;
- Increasing customer trust and loyalty, thereby improving the customer retention rate and the customer lifetime value (a 5% increase in customer retention can boost your revenue by 25-95%);
- Putting you ahead of your competitors in the same industry and establishing you as a forward-thinking and customer-centric brand;
- Helping you increase the net promoter score, i.e., turn your existing customers into brand loyalists who can market your brand via. word-of-mouth;
- Growing your customer base globally and fostering patience and tolerance in your customers (62% of customers are better positioned to tolerate a problem when they know they will receive customer support in their native tongue); and,
- Facilitating higher conversion rates (through pre-sales support) and an elevated customer experience (through post-sales customer service).
Best Practices For Providing Multilingual Customer Support
Utilize online translation management tools
Online translation management tools can come in handy when you do not have the budget or the manpower. By using the right online language translation tools can cut down on the additional expenses incurred in translation, primarily caused by human error, needless email conversation, and time spent uploading content and searching databases.
However, your customer service employees need not copy and paste inquiries. It is a colossal waste of time and causes a significant reduction in productivity when your employees constantly shuffle between multiple platforms. Not to mention, they run a high risk of copying the wrong information and, as a result, cause breach in data security. Therefore, you should only use free online translation tools if you have a restrained budget. Look for investing in options that enable the automated translation of messages into your preferred language.
Increase self-service options and build a comprehensive knowledge base
No customer would prefer sticking to a call, waiting for answers to simple concerns. Your consumers and prospects can obtain the information they require whenever they need it by referring to a pre-developed multilingual knowledge base and other self-service platforms.
The benefits of multilingual customer self-service extend to your business in more ways than one. Self-service, for one, is less expensive for your company than other live-support options. Second, you may produce more leads and customers even after regular business hours because your website users can get the information they require whenever and wherever they are. Additionally, having an SEO-friendly multilingual knowledge base can help you rank well in organic searches in different regions of the world. Ensure that your multilingual knowledge base is SEO-optimized. If your knowledge base supports the native language of a certain part of the world and is SEO-optimized, it is relatively easier for your target audience in that region to find you.
Your team will surely benefit from having a collection of FAQs and articles that have been expertly translated. When responding to emails or chat messages from clients, they can post links to these translated articles. This procedure ensures that your customers receive prompt resolutions and consistent responses.
Employ chatbots to ensure faster and efficient communication
Chatbots handle frequent queries and straightforward problems, which reduces the workload for your customer care staff. Since customer can get assistance and receive responses round-the-clock through this method of customer service, it boosts customer satisfaction.
Chatbots can also provide appropriate content based on a client’s location or browser language. Then, chatbots may identify their issues and forward them to the right team of agents.
Customers are directed to the teams best suited to respond to their inquiries thanks to this procedure. Additionally, it prevents clients from being shuffled between departments and having to reiterate their issues.
Types of Customer Channels Where You can Offer Multilingual Support
Multilingual live chat
Chat is among the simplest ways to provide multilingual support. Businesses may now instantaneously communicate with website visitors through chat, increase lead generation, and improve the online customer experience. While the customer may find instant live chat convenient, the benefit for you is that through multilingual live chat, you can foster stronger and more genuine connections with your customers, regardless of language and culture. Offering live chat in different languages can enhance sales and client retention efforts.
You can manage chat sessions with high connection speeds and hundreds of languages with the assistance of a language services provider.
Multilingual self-help material
It is imperative that your primary customer support documents be translated into the languages that your clients speak. Websites, FAQs, instruction manuals, tutorials, blog posts, how-to articles, whitepapers, testimonials, technical documents, and press releases are just a few examples of support materials that translate effectively. You can make your support materials more accessible to your present and potential clients by localizing them. You can overcome language barriers and make sure that your materials are culturally appropriate by working with a language service provider to translate and localize your customer support content. This will support your efforts to provide a consistent experience for all of your customers, regardless of their native language, culture, or location.
Multilingual video content​
Online videos make up 82% of consumer internet traffic in 2022 – so why not generate customer support videos in multiple languages that can capture customers’ attention all across the world? Videos can be used in a variety of ways to provide customer assistance. Examples include guides, discussions, testimonies, recordings of events, how-to guides, and many more. By adding subtitles or voice-over translation to a video — meant to educate clients about your goods or services — you can both expand your customer base, increase organic traffic and ease the workload on your customer care staff.
How Lingpad Helps You Offer Multilingual Customer Support
Customer service agents might not be able to scale it on their own – they need help and you can help them by integrating a TMS into your tech tools! As long as I am talking about translation management systems, may I introduce you to Lingpad. With just a few customer support agents, you can manage multilingual customer care thanks to Lingpad’s cloud-based, AI-powered Translation Management System. To cut costs and boost productivity, you may localize all brand communication, customize it following brand specifications, and add translations to Translation Memories (TMs) – to localize all brand collateral from chat support to help-center articles!
Let’s discuss what this means. Consider a scenario where your customer service representative is a native English speaker, and they get a question in Mandarin. When it is opened, the Lingpad software instantly translates the ticket into the customer support agent’s preferred language. The agent can then use the Lingpad app to order a human or AI-powered translation of the ticket into Mandarin once they have answered the customer’s concern suitably. Your business will not need to recruit people who speak other languages in order to acquire high-quality translations, thanks to Lingpad’s carefully curated network of knowledgeable translation providers for both human and AI-powered translations.
Lingpad seamlessly interacts with Zendesk and Freshdesk, two of the world’s most popular customer service applications. A big part of offering effective multilingual customer service is providing your global customer base with help in their native language. This is where Lingpad can put you at a great advantage. To translate and localize your help center or knowledge base articles, you can use the API integrations with Zendesk Guide, Freshdesk Knowledge Base, and Intercom Articles. Once the content residing in their knowledge bases is imported, Lingpad localizes the same before exporting it right back. This enables your customer service team to utilize their time to solve more complex issues that require human intervention, while your customers can avail of self-service whenever and from wherever they want! You can provide your customers with a seamless localization experience and prompt customer service in more than 180+ languages by working with the Lingpad App for Zendesk or the Lingpad App for Freshdesk. Thus, Lingpad makes it simple to optimize productivity and increase your customer satisfaction scores through multilingual customer care.
In a Nutshell…
Amit Shivani
Amit Shivani is the Director of Sales at Lingpad. His superpower is bridging the gap between client needs and wants along with the sheer determination to redefine sales. Working with various brands to tackle their localization demands brings out his out-of-box, innovative persona. When he is not helping clients achieve expertise-status in their localization journey, he explores cities and street food and works towards gaining expertise-status for himself in photography.
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