Thanks to online marketplaces and the increase in disposable income, customers are no longer limited to local options. In fact, cross-border ecommerce is expected to grow 107% between now and 2028, with value exceeding $3 trillion. 

With global buying comes the need for global support, so it’s easy to see why B2B and B2C organizations need to prepare for global buyers and offer multilingual customer service. But what considerations do organizations need to prioritize when they’re on the hunt for the perfect automatic translation solution?

What the best instant translator for your business looks like

Much like a suit, you can’t just pick up something generic off the market and call it a day. It’s not enough for it to be perfect — it needs to be perfectly tailored for you.

There are several important factors you need to examine before you start evaluating different translation products. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you weigh the pros and cons of each solution.

Is the solution secure?

Sometimes customer service involves getting sensitive and private information from customers. If your support agents are pasting your customers’ messages on a free online translation tool like Google Translate, this puts customer data — and your brand reputation — at risk. Even if you do employ a translation tool, it’s crucial to ensure that they have airtight security measures in place. 

For example, Language I/O has zero data retention and sophisticated data masking. This means customer data is masked right away and nothing is stored in our servers even to train the engines. Not only that, we also have regular comprehensive audits in place to make sure we adhere to various current and emerging legal and ethical standards.

Is the solution reliably accurate?

Bad translations could make you lose money and customer trust. There’s no good outcome from inaccurate translations — and businesses have had to answer for everything from offended customers to failed knee replacement surgeries. 

Not only should the solution be accurate in general, it should also be adaptable to your business and industry. For example, you might have terms and jargon unique to your organization or field, or you might be dealing with user-generated content rife with misspellings and slang. Either way, your translation solution must be tailored for your business so it can address all these and more accurately. 

It’s important to note here that it’s important to find a solution that’s tailored for your business needs. A general-purpose language model is trained on all kinds of data, and it provides translations that are the most likely, not the most accurate. On the other hand, language models for neural machine translation are more focused and specifically tailored on data based on your industry, subject matter, terminology, etc. This means NMT will give you the translation that’s the most accurate in that specific context.

Is the translation, well, instant?

An instant translator must be able to provide accurate translations in real time. This means immediately translating right where it matters — on a CRM, with an integration or an API. Whether you’re looking to enable self-service, answer emails, provide instant chatbot support, be available on social media for your customers or all of the above, your translation technology should be equipped to make it happen, in real time. 

And there’s more to automatic translation solutions

This goes without saying, but there’s so much more you can gain out of choosing the right vendor for your customer support translation. Apart from translating accurately and supporting your customer support agents as they handle tickets in other languages, the best instant translation solution will always save you time and costs. Not only that, it should be easy to set up and easy to expand into more languages. 

At the end of the day, no matter what solution you choose, it shouldn’t be a steep uphill climb before it starts providing value; the right automatic translation platform will start providing value from day one.