Even if a company does business in a single country, many of its customers likely speak different languages. English is no longer enough as the only business language: In the US alone, the number of non-English-speaking households has continued to rise over the years. Not being able to support these consumers can limit a company’s market and growth potential. To cater to this diverse clientele, companies are increasingly implementing multilingual customer support. Let’s take a closer look at what multilingual customer service means and why your support function needs it.

What is multilingual customer support?

Language I/O coined the term “multilingual customer support” in early 2012. Multilingual customer support is the practice of providing customer assistance in multiple languages. This approach ensures that customers can communicate in their preferred language, significantly enhancing their overall experience.

In other words, multilingual customer service is all about breaking down language barriers to provide effective communication between businesses and their global customer base. It involves deploying a team of support agents fluent in various languages and integrating technology and tools for seamless multilingual interaction on various channels like chat and email. Before you go further, if you have not read our blog “What is Translation?” you should give it a read.

Why your team must offer multilingual support: Six benefits of multilingual customer support

Modern customer service has long grown out of the boundaries and limitations of geography. Growing a business requires brands to go beyond borders and cater to international customers. This means speaking in your prospective customers’ language in every location and after selling your products, providing multilingual customer care. 

Aside from breaking language barriers, multilingual customer support provides many benefits.

Enhanced customer satisfaction

When customers can communicate in their native language, they feel understood and valued. This personalized experience can significantly boost their satisfaction. 

Not only that, multilingual support also ensures that issues can be resolved more quickly and accurately, as there’s no need for translation or interpretation. This leads to a more efficient service and happier customers.

Expanded market reach

By offering support in multiple languages, your business can tap into new markets and attract a broader audience. This is particularly crucial for companies looking to expand internationally. 

And even within one location, multilingual support makes your services accessible to multiple demographics, like non-English speakers, promoting inclusivity and ensuring that no customer feels left out.

Increased customer loyalty

Multilingual customer support plays a big role in building trust. When customers know they can rely on your business for support in their language, they are more likely to develop trust and loyalty. This can lead to repeat business and long-term customer relationships.

At the end of the day, satisfied customers are the ones who are more likely to recommend your services to others, especially within their linguistic and cultural communities. This can result in positive word-of-mouth and organic growth.

Competitive advantage

Offering multilingual support sets you apart from competitors who may only provide service in one language. This unique selling point can be a deciding factor for potential customers choosing between you and your competitors.

A business that invests in multilingual support demonstrates a commitment to customer care and cultural sensitivity. This can enhance your brand’s reputation and appeal.

Better insights and analytics

Multilingual customer service teams can gather valuable insights into the needs and preferences of different customer segments. This data can inform marketing strategies and product development to better serve your audience.

Plus, collecting feedback in multiple languages allows for a more comprehensive understanding of customer satisfaction and areas for improvement, giving you greater insight into the diverse needs of your customers.

Improved efficiency and productivity

Apart from improved customer experience, multilingual customer support can lead to more productive support agents: With faster response times and fewer misunderstandings, multilingual support is an effective way to increase the impact of your customer service team.

Customer support in the customers’ native language also leads to reduced miscommunication and greater clarity, which also helps with faster resolution of issues. And with customer problems solved in less team and your team’s increased efficiency, you could also potentially reduce costs.

Potential challenges related to providing multi-language customer support

While multilingual customer support could only help a brand, the biggest challenge is doing it well. Poorly translated customer service could end up eclipsing all the effort an organization might have put into supporting their customers in many languages. 

Here are some challenges organizations must overcome to provide efficient and effective multilingual customer support. 

Resource allocation

Implementing a multilingual customer support system requires resources, such as hiring multilingual agents or investing in translation tools, which can be time-consuming and expensive for businesses. Finding agents who are fluent in many languages while also having all the customer service skills and product expertise might be challenging.

Technical constraints

Some translation technology might not work well with the existing tools or not integrate with the existing tech stack, adding more complexity to the situation.

Rare languages

Depending on the languages spoken in a specific region or country, it may be challenging to find multilingual support agents or translation services for certain languages.

How to provide a great multilingual customer experience in your organization: Four practical tips

Business leaders must consider a few important steps before and while they implement multi-language customer support in their organization. 

Assess language needs

Assessing the language needs of your customers is an essential step before implementing multilingual support. This involves understanding which languages your target audience speaks and their preferred methods of communication. Analyze the linguistic demographics of your customer base to identify which languages to support. There are a few ways to tackle this.

• Research your target market to determine the primary languages spoken by potential customers. This can be done through surveys, focus groups, or analyzing demographic data. 
• If you have a global customer base, consider which languages are prevalent in different regions where you operate. 
• You can also look at the types of inquiries you receive from customers to identify any common language barriers and prioritize which languages to support first.
• Stay informed about industry trends and changes in customer language needs to ensure you are continuously meeting the demands of your target audience.

Hire and train multilingual staff

Hiring or training staff who are fluent in multiple languages ensures direct and accurate communication with customers or offering language training to current employees might help with establishing multilingual customer support at your organization. Recruit individuals fluent in the necessary languages, and continue to provide ongoing training in customer service best practices.

Ideally, a customer can just pick up the phone, send an email, or chat with a company, and the agent on the other end will easily understand and help them. Unfortunately, that can be a logistical nightmare for a company. This is especially true when managing multiple time zones, shifts, and languages. 

Leverage technology

One might think that the only route to providing customer support in multiple languages is to hire people who communicate in multiple languages. However, as discussed above, hiring such talented agents is expensive and not necessarily scalable for all businesses.

Invest in translation technologies and tools facilitating seamless multilingual communication. Using advanced translation tools and software can aid in real-time communication and documentation across different languages, which is especially crucial when you’re providing multilingual support chat or chatbot.

When leveraging technology, it’s important to make sure your translations are consistently of high quality. How to ensure quality translation? There are many different kinds of translation technology, like large language models (LLMs), which are more general purpose, and neural machine translation (NMT), which are more context-aware and can be fine-tuned to your business’s specific needs. 

A more sophisticated AI-powered translation platform like Language I/O aggregates the world’s leading translation engines and intelligently selects the best one for your business, the language pair, etc. Language I/O also imposes your brand’s glossary and ensures that translations are accurate and reflect your brand. Most importantly, not all translation solutions are secure: Language I/O ensures that your customer data is never stored on systems and all personally identifiable information (PII) is masked before translation.

Ultimately, what works for one company might not work for another. That’s why it’s important to find the right solution for your organization. 

Monitor and adapt

It’s important to regularly review the effectiveness of your multilingual support and adapt strategies based on customer feedback and evolving needs. As your business expands and evolves, make sure to regularly review and update your multilingual support strategies to ensure they are still effective and meeting the needs of your customers. 

Six channels to offer multilingual customer care

Every support channel can be turned into a multilingual support channel with the right solutions. 

When making multilingual customer service available to your local and global customers, it’s crucial to consider where they are more likely to contact for help. Depending on several factors like your domain, urgency of the issue, time zone, geographical location etc., different channels might be more appropriate for your customers. Providing various ways for customers to reach out, such as phone, email, chat, or social media, allows them to choose the most comfortable option for them. 

Multilingual phone support

Let’s be honest: IVRs are taking over phone support. Automated call directing solutions are also increasingly multilingual these days. 

However, when a customer wishes to speak with a human agent in their preferred language, your business can accommodate that only with multilingual agents. First of all, it’s not always easy: Anyone who’s tried to hire agents fluent in less common languages would tell you all about the difficulties they might have encountered. This only leads to longer support times for those customers.

Even among multilingual agents, you might have barriers to comprehension because of dialects or slang. For example, consider a Canadian French agent supporting a French customer from France, or a Portuguese-speaking customer from Portugal receiving help from a Brazilian Portuguese agent. They might not be speaking the same language, even though it looks like that’s the case at a surface level.

Top this all off with the need for consistent training to ensure all agents have a high level of proficiency in multiple languages, and you’ve got yourself a less-than-modern solution that doesn’t quite meet your customers where they are.

Multilingual email and ticket support

Email and ticket support is fast overtaking phone as the preferred support channel. Instead of waiting for the next available agent while listening to Muzak, customers could send an email and just wait for a response. This also gives agents the ability to take the time to offer meaningful responses. 

When email tickets are multilingual, it takes a lot of the hassle of customer support out of the equation. Especially with the use of accurate translation technology like Language I/O, an organization can leverage its agents anywhere in the world to answer these queries in any time zone, even without the specific language skills. This makes it possible to adhere to a good turnaround time while also not limiting the customer service team to operate during the business hours in the customers’ geographies.

Multilingual live chat support

In today’s fast-paced world, where customers expect prompt assistance in their preferred language, multilingual live chat has become an essential tool for businesses looking to provide exceptional customer care. It involves having trained representatives available to answer customer inquiries and provide assistance through a chat platform on the company’s website or mobile app. 

By offering this convenient and efficient communication channel, businesses can improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships with their diverse customer base. 

Compared to phone support, multilingual live chat can be more cost-effective as it requires fewer resources and can handle multiple conversations at once. Live chat also allows for more personalized support as representatives can view customer information and previous interactions, making it easier to provide tailored assistance. 

From a customer experience perspective, live chat is also more user-friendly and accessible, making it an attractive option for customers who may not be comfortable with traditional customer service channels such as phone calls or emails.

Multilingual chatbot support

Multilingual chatbots are AI-powered virtual assistants that can communicate with customers in multiple languages. They can be integrated into various communication channels, including live chat, social media, and messaging apps, to provide quick and automated customer support. 

Unlike human agents who can only assist one customer at a time, multilingual chatbots can assist multiple customers in several languages at the same time. Not only that, it can also operate round-the-clock, providing global customers with instant access to assistance at any time. 

Chatbots can handle routine and repetitive tasks, allowing human representatives to focus on more complex issues, resulting in faster response times and improved efficiency. As businesses grow and expand into new markets, chatbots can easily adapt to different languages, making them a scalable option for customer support.

Similar to live chat, chatbots are cost-effective as they require minimal resources and can handle multiple conversations simultaneously. 

Multilingual social media support

Several international markets like Brazil and India prefer alternative customer support channels like WhatsApp and other social media platforms. Social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have a vast user base, making it an ideal platform to engage with customers from diverse backgrounds. Similar to live chat and chatbot, social media also allows for instant communication and quick responses to customer inquiries or issues. 

Several brands develop a social media personality with a distinct brand voice. By actively engaging with customers on social media, businesses can improve their brand visibility and build a loyal customer base from different language demographics.

Multilingual help desk, knowledge base articles and other self-service options

Effective multilingual customer service also includes offering self-service options in multiple languages: Your website, FAQ pages, help center and other online resources should be available in multiple languages to make it easier for customers to find information on their own. 

A multilingual help center is a resource hub where customers can find self-service solutions, troubleshoot common issues, and access FAQs in multiple languages. It can be integrated into a company’s website or mobile app to provide 24/7 support to customers in their preferred language. A comprehensive and user-friendly multilingual knowledge base empowers customers to find information and resolve issues on their own, without the need to contact customer support. 

Self-service options also come with the added benefit of reduced workload for support agents. With a well-equipped help center, customers can find answers to their questions on their own, leaving customer support teams to focus on more complex issues instead of handling routine inquiries.

Help centers are also available 24/7, allowing customers to find assistance at their convenience regardless of time zone differences or business hours.

Implement high-quality multilingual support with Language I/O.

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