It’s not just about your product anymore. You also have to have good customer support. For international companies, that means providing your customers with multilingual support. A 2016 study by Common Sense Advisory found that 74% of customers are more likely to buy if support is provided in their native language.
Along with having customer support available in several different languages, your support also has to be as accurate as possible. Since most organizations have their own product-specific vocabulary, combined with a high volume of user-generated content, providing accurate translations can be a challenge. There are several barriers to deal with along the way.
The Challenges of Machine Translation
When you decide to go all-in on enterprise level multilingual customer support for your company, there are many challenges to address.
- Third-party tools are inaccurate, and at times, don’t contain the right vocabulary. Their words don’t necessarily translate directly to another language and they may use a different word or phrase to identify a product in a different language.
- Third-party tools can’t translate multiple languages well. For instance, you might find one that does okay with English to Spanish, but not English to Portuguese.
- If the company doesn’t specify a standard tool for translation, agents may start using different tools. Once that happens, the company loses control over translation and how it provides customer support.
- Even with a decent translation tool, there’s still manual work required with most translating. You’ll need to train or program your translation engine for each language. Depending on the tool, you may need to have a person checking translations to make sure they’re acceptable.
- Figuring out the different tools, implementing them, and performing any manual translation is going to lead to time and productivity loss.
More Live Agents Are Not the Answer
An alternative to machine translation and off-the-shelf tools for chat support is to hire additional staff to provide multilingual support. While live agents can offer a great experience for the customer, they increase your company’s cost to provide support. It takes time to hire and bring on support staff, then train them to provide the high level of customer service you want. If you’re adding more than one additional customer support language, you’ll need to hire agents for each language, adding additional time and expense.
Another downside of hiring additional human staff is that it’s hard to scale up quickly. When you need to provide more support, such as when you release new products and grow your company, or during the Covid pandemic, these tools may not be available to provide 24/7 support. That leads to unhappy customers in your global market, who may be trying to get support during normal business hours for their area, but it’s the middle of the night in your area.
A Technology Breakthrough Means Better Translation
While there are challenges to address, you simply can’t ignore that your company must offer multilingual support. Your customers want to be able to connect with you easily, in the language they prefer, and get the support they need. Multilingual support will give you a business edge, something that’s increasingly hard to have these days. It also provides a positive customer experience, while giving the company a good impact on overall customer support metrics.
Fortunately, translation technology has advanced in recent years. There are newer options on the market that can help you provide multilingual support quickly, accurately, in all the languages you need, with the ability to scale up when you need to. One way to provide a better customer experience is to offer machine generated live chat and web support using Language I/O.
Language I/O differs from other machine translation tools by offering simultaneous translation in multiple languages, where your customers can choose to communicate in the language they prefer. Language I/O lets your existing agents speak in their own language while it translates to the language the customer chooses.
Chat is always available, so you can offer multilingual chat support and web support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Your customers are able to get support at any time it’s convenient for them.
Multilingual translation from Language I/O also helps your company reduce customer service escalations, because the quality of translation is good. More issues will be resolved on the first contact, especially for routine and frequently asked questions. And since customers can communicate in the language they prefer, it will help your customer service satisfaction ratings.
By providing multilingual translation out of the box, Language I/O allows your company to proactively improve customer support. Your company can upgrade to multilingual support in a matter of days, instead of the weeks or months it takes to program other translation engines. Get started today by providing your customers with a better user experience by offering 24/7 multilingual chat and web support. Contact Language I/O today to see how we can help.