Attracting global clients is great, but what happens when that client says, “We love your product. How are you going to support our clients, the majority of whom speak Russian?”
Nearly two years ago, global technology company, Taulia, was experiencing this problem. Taulia is a financial supply chain company that helps companies unlock working capital through an easy-to-use platform that helps buyers and sellers optimize cash. At the time, Taulia’s salespeople were attracting international clients with its great product, but wasn’t always sure how to answer the multilingual support question.
“They would ask us, ‘so when are you going to hire a Russian-speaking customer service agent?’” said Peter Swisher, Taulia’s director of Technical Services.
As many businesses understand, hiring customer service agents to service every language the business serves is costly and often inefficient. Does it make sense to hire one part-or full-time Russian speaker if a relatively small percentage of the clientele speaks Russian?
Swisher knew there had to be a better solution. Because Taulia works within the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system Service Cloud, he looked for multilingual customer support systems on the Salesforce AppExchange that work with Salesforce CMS integration. That’s how Swisher found Language I/O, which works within both the Salesforce and Oracle platforms.
Not long after discovering Language I/O, Taulia—with Language I/O’s help—had translated more than 500 articles into four core languages.
“Now when I get that question, ‘so when are you going to hire a Russian-speaking customer service agent?’ the answer is much more simple,” Swisher said. “I say, ‘we do the translations with technology.’ I can’t tell you the amount of stress that’s taken off of me and my sales team. My sales team knows we can now speak any language and we can get any language set up very quickly.”
Today, Taulia supports eighteen languages. Using Language I/O’s software suite prevented Taulia from having to hire bilingual customer service agents to support those languages.
“Language I/O has allowed us to expand worldwide without having to change customer support resources at all,” Swisher said. “It’s scalable and it one hundred percent can meet any customer’s need anywhere in any language without us having to add additional resources. My hiring plan is now one hundred percent capacity based as opposed to being language skill based.”
Because Language I/O works with the Oracle and Salesforce CRMs, implementation is easy.
“There was a lot of give and take with the relationship from the get-go,” Swisher said. “Language I/O really impressed us with their willingness to work with us and our security requirements. The Language I/O team was great at finding ways to meet all of our needs at a reasonable price.”