Customer support has long been seen as a reactive function. Customer comes to a brand with a problem, the brand solves that problem, and all’s well, right? However, in the age of omnichannel communication, reactive customer service is no longer enough. 

The customer journey is sprawled out across multiple digital and offline touchpoints. Today’s customer is open to sharing their data with brands, as long as brands provide personalized and proactive service — according to a Salesforce report, 51% of customers expect brands to anticipate their needs, but only 33% of customers say most companies address their issues proactively. This means that customers are putting more time and effort into solving issues than brands. Add to this the pain of communicating with unevenly trained and equipped agents in a second or even third language, and it quickly becomes a recipe for disaster. 

Let’s dive deeper into the importance of proactive service, and why automatic translation is your best bet in reducing customer effort and becoming a customer’s favorite brand.

Proactive service and automatic translation both improve efficiency

Preemptively addressing your customers’ issues and automatic translation solutions have one thing in common: improved efficiency. But first, we need to hash out a few details.

The biggest friction in this equation is our understanding of efficiency. It’s crucial to remember that efficiency doesn’t mean cutting corners. Solving your customers’ problems should always be the top priority. This means when you measure your success, your top metrics must have more to do with the quality of service and customer experience, and not just efficiency. 

With that out of the way, let’s straighten out what counts as proactive customer support. We think it’s empowering customers to take control of their own experience and reducing the amount of time and effort they have to put into solving issues with a brand. This means your customer can easily find what they need — and you can reduce your own workload a little bit. 

If you think you have several complaining customers on your hands, think again: Only 1 in 26 customers complain and raise issues. The others would just choose to stop buying from your brand. And forget buying; 70% of customers abandon their cart after adding an item to it.

Reducing customer effort

Give your customers easy ways to learn more about your products and get their questions answered. Consider a comprehensive knowledge base with an integrated chatbot. If your customer is lingering on a page, confused about something, your chatbot can step in and preemptively support the customer. And if these are available in your customers’ preferred languages, you’ve solved a big piece of the communication puzzle. This helps avoid miscommunications and further confusion. 

And self-service is what the next generation of customers prefer. A recent survey revealed that 38% of Gen Z and millennial customers say they’d abandon solving an issue if they couldn’t resolve it through self-service. This means if you don’t empower these customers with the information they need, you’re letting a valuable opportunity to connect with them slip right through your fingers.

Improving the quality and speed of service

Implementing thorough self-service solutions means helping users solve their own problems without getting into your agents’ queues. This reduces agent workload and keeps them focused on more high-impact, high-value problems. A Salesforce survey says that self-service solves roughly 54% of customer issues on average — that’s more than half your agents’ workload.

Plus, chatbots do way more than just say hello. An advanced chatbot not only collects user feedback but also turns that data into actionable intelligence for your team. AI can help by collecting data that will continually evolve and adapt, enabling customer service agents to implement a more effective and personalized strategy that improves customer experience. 

If you incorporate more AI-driven solutions such as predictive analytics and sentiment analysis, your chatbot is able to analyze customer communication and also anticipate trends. Solutions like agent-assist track customer communication in real time, understand the context, and scour the knowledge base to proactively feed agents with articles that are relevant to ongoing conversations. When your agents are given access to this knowledge base and the autonomy they need, your brand can offer a much more elevated customer experience.

Brands with global and multilingual audiences must also implement a high-quality translation solution that would keep them in touch with their customers without compromising on customer experience. Without an AI-powered automatic translation tool embedded directly into the CRM, agents resort to time-consuming and highly vulnerable methods like pasting confidential and sensitive customer information into free translation tools. With an advanced solution like Language I/O, you get the following advantages, among others:

• Agents translate right where they communicate, avoiding hassle and security hazards
• All customer communication is translated in a context-aware manner, meaning misspellings, slang, jargon, etc., are all relayed accurately
• Insights from a translation solution like Language I/O guide your strategy and help you analyze the latest trends

No more gambling with your customer experience

Service organizations are no longer cost centers; customer service is a value driver. A whopping 71% of customers say they make purchasing decisions based on the quality of customer service. Not only that, 3 out of 4 customers forgive a company’s mistakes after receiving excellent service and recommend brands that offer fantastic support. This means your customer support must shift from reactive to proactive: Brands must meet customers where they are and reduce their burden in finding solutions.

Proactive service and the right automatic translation partner can lead to a win-win situation all around. Many customers who have felt the pain of waiting for the next agent will tell you that the quality of experience depends on the day, their luck, the stars aligning, and getting the right agent. This shouldn’t be the case; your customer service needs to be consistent for all customers, across all your agents and all the languages. For your customers to feel empowered to find what they need and for agents to receive the most up-to-date knowledge so they can guide your customers, you need a single source of truth: an exhaustive knowledge base that’s translated into your audiences’ preferred languages. You also need a chatbot that can, at the very least, deal with low-hanging fruit, so your agents can handle more complex issues. 

By bolstering these self-service solutions with AI-powered technology like automatic translation, you expand your customer support, elevate customer experience, and make your brand truly global.