If you are reading this article, you likely need to offer multilingual customer support. You may have thought about providing multilingual support or have done the math and realized that there is a substantial financial upside to accommodating the six billion people worldwide who are non-native English speakers. So, what can Multilingual Customer Support offer your customers?
What is Multilingual Customer Support?
Multilingual customer support means ensuring that your customers, regardless of their native or preferred language, culture, or location, can get the most out of your products and services. It can happen through a range of language-accessible customer support services that you provide, such as answering customer questions, giving assistance, troubleshooting, or upgrading the customer’s experience in their native or preferred language.
Why You Need Multilingual Customer Support
Offering multilingual customer support can help you in the following ways:
Multilingual Customer Support Increases Accessibility for New Customers Internationally
With six billion non-native English speakers worldwide, expanding your multilingual support can only increase your market accessibility. Translating your website can improve the visibility of your offerings on search engines across the different languages you are targeting. Also, the translation of your support materials, such as videos and your social media content, and customer accessibility increases substantially. As a result, businesses accommodating this large population segment have a higher chance of winning more customers than those without.
People Prefer Doing Business in Their Language
People prefer companies and brands that offer information in their native language.
Learn in-depth about boosting the customer experience with multilingual support in the article: Boost Your Customer Experience with Multilingual Support.
Industries Where Multilingual Customer Support is Often Found
Below are some examples of industries where multilingual customer support can be found:
- Travel and Hospitality: The travel and hospitality industry requires ongoing communication with customers and guests, which means many calls, emails, and web chats in multiple languages. Adding multilingual customer support can improve the guest experience and increase bookings while reducing cancellations and complaints.
- Online Retailers or e-tailers: Opening a multilingual online store can open your sales to the international market. Having your website and product info, including your shopping cart, translated into various languages is just a start. You’ll also want to offer customer support for your international clientele. It can come in chat, email, and live phone support, as well as the translation of customer support materials, such as videos and how-to documents.
- Medical and Healthcare: Healthcare organizations are required by law to offer HIPAA-compliant, multilingual, multichannel medical support for their patients. Many healthcare organizations have set up multilingual contact centers to accommodate their patient’s needs while working with language services companies to bridge the language divide between patients and providers. Learn more about translation and interpretation for healthcare.
- Technology: Technical support for tech companies that offer SAAS (Software as a Service), applications, electronics, and hardware products can be provided in various ways. From translating your eLearning, software, product information, and technical instructions to delivering live customer support Over-the-Phone, it makes all the difference in how your technology can be distributed and adopted.
Types of Customer Channels Where You Can Offer Multilingual Support
For an optimal customer service experience, you’ll want to offer multilingual support in multiple customer channels. For the best customer experience, try setting up a multilingual omnichannel contact center. Below are other types of channels that can offer multilingual support.
1. Providing Multilingual Live Chat
One of the easiest ways to add multilingual support is with live chat. Live chat has enabled businesses to instantly talk to online visitors and generate more leads while enhancing the online customer experience. If done correctly, chat can benefit both the customer and the agent. Chat can be a huge convenience to customers when offered around the clock. Offering live chat in multiple languages can increase sales and customer retention by building stronger relationships and creating a more authentic customer experience for everyone, regardless of language and culture.
A language services provider can help you administer chat sessions in hundreds of languages, 24/7, with fast connection speeds. This arrangement can be done per minute and integrated with your favorite chat platform.
2. Improving Resolution Times with Multilingual Chat Bots
Regardless of your customer’s language, they prefer fast resolutions. As a result, this is where chatbots can help you provide a more convenient customer experience while reducing strain on your team. In addition, by translating your chatbot scripts into different languages, you can assist more customers while determining their potential need for live support.
3. Providing Over-the-Phone Interpretation Support
There are many benefits to adding Over-the-Phone Interpretation (OPI) to your contact center. The main advantage of OPI is that it instantly gives your agents access to on-demand interpreters. A leading language provider can offer 24/7/365 access to professional interpreters in multiple languages. It is a cost-effective way to improve multilingual support for many contact centers without requiring in-house resources. This service can also be complementary in contact centers with in-house interpreters but may need to fill occasional needs for additional languages or resources.
4. Translating Customer Support Materials
Having your crucial customer support materials translated into the native languages that your customers speak is essential. Support materials that lend themselves well to translation include websites, questions and answers, instructional manuals, guides, blog posts, how-to articles, whitepapers, testimonials, technical documents, and press releases, to name a few. By translating your support materials, you are increasing accessibility for your current and future customers. In addition, partnering with a language service provider to translate and localize your customer support content will help you break down language barriers and ensure that your materials are culturally appropriate, all of which will contribute to your efforts to create a cohesive experience for your customers, regardless of their native language, culture or locale.
5. Making Your Video Content Language Accessible
Using video as a medium has been growing and growing. Videos can take all forms for customer support. Tutorial examples include interviews, reviews, testimonials, recorded events, and how-tos. For example, suppose you are using video to educate customers about your products or services. In that case, enhancing it with subtitles or voice-over translation will help you reach new customers while simultaneously reducing the strain on your customer support agents.
Let BIG Language Help You
BIG Language Solutions expertly navigates the complex nature of language services for our customers so that they can achieve global success with their customers. BIG customizes and delivers language services in more than 300 languages and dialects. We offer capabilities from translation and OPI to voiceover and eLearning. So, whatever your language requirements, we get it right from the start while ensuring a seamless user experience.
Contact us today to learn how we can help with your customer support needs.
