For a customer service representative, nothing feels better than delivering an experience that leaves the customer wowed. Delivering happiness. Whether it’s because of your responsiveness, helpfulness, or the personalization of your support—or, ideally, a combination of all three—you want the customer that you’re helping to come away from the conversation feeling excellent about their experience with you and the brand you represent. Problem solved! 

Providing that kind of customer experience isn’t easy. With customer expectations for support experiences higher than ever, the level of support demanded from customer service representatives has significantly grown. Wowing customers means delivering an exceptional customer experience that will increase the customer’s loyalty no matter which channel they used to reach out to you in the minimum time. And when it comes to bringing authenticity and results to multilingual customer support, several considerations come into play.

Thankfully, artificial intelligence enables customer support teams not only to provide multilingual support, but to do so in a way that is fast, efficient, accurate, and consistent with brand messaging. However, there are many factors that contribute to AI-based solutions, all of which must be considered when introducing new technology to your customer service team.

Preserve Efficiency by Incorporating Multilingual Support in Existing Workflows

One common challenge that organizations face when introducing new technology is disturbances to existing workflows and operational processes. These processes exist for a reason, and when new systems require a change in procedure, it often results in reluctance from team members. This is why looking for technology that integrates directly with existing systems is critical to ensuring the team adopts it without issue. And, ideally, the integration should be so easy to use that no agent training is required.

For customer service teams seeking to provide multilingual support, this means finding a solution that directly plugs into your CRM, whether it’s Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle Service Cloud, or any other platform. Using any multilingual enablement service that doesn’t directly integrate into your existing platform will result in countless wasted hours and frustration for the support agent who has to constantly switch between systems. Agents are strategic to your brand so you want to make it easy for them so that they can maximize their time interacting with customers.

A Discussion About Generative AI, LLMs and the Future of Translation

To bolster translation accuracy in a business landscape that demands multilingual competency, LLM training or domain adaptation is essential. This recording guides you to maintain a first-rate customer experience through effective and efficient communication.

Ensure Accuracy with Real-Time Selection of the Best Translation Engine

As machine translation becomes more widespread, the number of available machine translation engines is increasing. Each machine translation engine is different and will handle translations with more or less accuracy and fluency, which is why powering accurate translations for your customer support needs relies on selecting the best possible engine for each request in real time.

The best possible engine for a specific translation varies based on a number of factors, including but not limited to content type, languages involved in the translation, and end translation goal. Even in similar customer service scenarios, the best engine choice could vary depending on the organization. Using a solution that automatically selects the best translation engine allows agents to focus on what they do best: dealing with complex issues and generating connections with customers. Meanwhile, the AI technology supporting the communication will actively learn from the content, so that the output quality consistently improves over time.

Maintaining Brand Voice in Multilingual Content

Translations are complex in nature, especially when introducing brand voice to the equation. Regardless of the language used, organizations strive to maintain brand messaging, which requires a focus on consistent terminology, tone of voice, and other unique nuances related to their brand language and style.

Customers prefer companies they understand and feel they can establish a genuine connection with; ensuring that machine translation output aligns with what customers expect is key to maintaining brand recognition and a higher customer satisfaction rate. One way to accomplish consistency of brand voice is by establishing a glossary of terms that should be translated in a specific way. This preserves messaging by ensuring that tricky items like slang, acronyms, and company-specific jargon are translated properly.

Glossaries allow organizations to maintain brand-specific terms – including made-up words! – across multiple languages. Take this example translation of a support request using invented Magic the Gathering terminology.

Making Excellent Multilingual Support a Reality

At Language I/O, we believe that language shouldn’t be a barrier to providing timely, efficient, and helpful customer support. That’s why our unique multilingual customer support tools are built to incorporate all of the factors listed above. Not only do we have turnkey solutions for Salesforce, Zendesk, and Oracle, we also have an API that can be used to plug our solution into any other CRMs so that support team members don’t have to switch between multiple interfaces to service a customer. Our suite of tools supports translation of articles and tickets as well as real-time channels such as chat, all while selecting the best engine for each request. Furthermore, our Self-Improving Glossary (SIGLO) maintains a database of terminology that must be translated in a specific, unique way, allowing your brand to continually maintain its unique voice regardless of the language. 

Finally, we know that there are situations where machine translation isn’t quite good enough and a human translator is required. This is why estimating the quality of machine translation output is needed to signal that a translation requires a human translator’s review or input with a very fast turnaround. That time is currently below 30 minutes, so customers don’t have to wait. 

Multilingual customer service is a strategic engine for growth. If you would like to learn more about Language I/O’s unique approach to translation management software, contact us to see a demo.

Diego Bartolome

Chief Technology Officer at Language I/O

Diego has been working for over 16 years at the intersection of languages and technology to help people and companies communicate in any language. He has built cohesive teams to create, improve, and scale tech products with a deep business impact both at his own start-up tauyou and at TransPerfect. Prior to Language I/O, he worked on cognitive services (language, speech, vision, and decision) at Microsoft.