What’s a self-help customer? One of those brilliant people who takes it upon themselves to dig through frequently asked questions (FAQs) before calling, emailing, or chatting with customer service agents. They’re the kid in class who actually reads through the instructions before asking, “how do I do this again?

We love self-helpers. They save customer service teams time and money. But what happens when your website doesn’t speak their language, or your article translations read like alphabet soup? Into the call, email, or chat queue those self-help customers go.  

One of our clients, Cable ONE, which is an all-inclusive provider of Cable TV, Internet, and phone services in more than eighteen states, had a problem helping self-helpers. The majority of Cable ONE’s agents couldn’t speak to the Spanish-speaking residents in their communities, a pretty big deal considering that in some areas, native Spanish speakers make up 80 percent of Cable ONE’s customer base.

Because Cable ONE only had a handful of Spanish speaking agents and knew it would be a challenge for them to handle all Spanish-speaking calls, they turned to self-helpers. What could Cable ONE do to engage self-help customers? Get those FAQs translated to Spanish, of course.

Easy in theory. Not so easy in principle. Accurate FAQ translations can be painfully slow. For Cable ONE, article translation with traditional translation firms spelled a multi-year project. Multiple years before Cable ONE could speak to 20 percent of its overall customer base.

That’s when Cable ONE turned to Language I/O and our flagship product suite. Instead of manually exporting each support article for translation and then importing the Spanish version – also manually —Language I/O Help completely automated and streamlined the translation and export/import process. Not only did this satisfy Cable ONE’s self-help customers, it lessened the workload for its few Spanish-speaking agents.

When we solved the problem of helping the self-help customer, Cable ONE wrote, “If I could somehow globally thank Language I/O for making this Spanish site launch so seamless and flawless…”

Guess what? They just did. Let us help you help those self-helpers. Contact us here.

For recent articles about customers services self-helpers, check out this Forbes piece written by @BlakeMichelleM and this Social Media Today piece written by @Caitlin_Zucal.