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Imagine Julie, a customer from Spain, ordered a pair of shoes from an international eCommerce platform. Upon receiving the order, she discovered that the shoes were not her size. For immediate assistance, she contacted the eCommerce brand’s customer support. However, the representative only spoke English, and the brand was not offering any multilingual customer service.
Julie struggled to communicate her issue and couldn’t fully understand the solutions being offered. Being frustrated and dissatisfied, she ultimately decided to abandon the brand and take her business elsewhere.
Well, this is a common issue faced by many customers. When companies fail to offer support in their customers’ native languages, it leads to misunderstandings, dissatisfaction, and ultimately, customer churn.
For businesses that have customers all around the world, offering multilingual customer service is no longer a luxury for them—it’s a necessity to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
In this blog, we will discuss the various aspects of multilingual customer service including:
In simple terms, multilingual support in customer service is all about offering same level of assistance in multiple languages, enhancing the overall customer experience (CX).
This approach ensures that your customers can engage with your business and get assistance in their preferred language, through various communication channels like live chat, email, phone, or social media. If you have a global business in banking, insurance, telecom or eCommerce sector with customers all around the world, opting for multilingual support is essential to connect with a diverse, international audience.
But it’s not just about international markets; according to Slator, even within the US, nearly 20% of the population, which is around 68 million people speak a language other than English at home. Providing assistance in their native language helps you stay ahead of your competitors taking your CX to the next level.
Research shows that businesses with a global audience risk losing up to 75% of B2B and B2C buyers if they don’t offer multilingual customer support. These customers are more inclined to do business with brands that offer after-sales support services in their native language. When you operate your business across different markets without providing native language support, chances are high that your customers eventually will switch to competitors who offer better language accessibility.
Here are some key benefits of offering multilingual support:
Benefits of multilingual customer support
When you allow your clients to communicate with your support reps in their preferred language they can communicate and describe their concerns more effectively. At the same time, your native-speaking representatives can engage with them fluently, ensuring clear and efficient communication. This personalized approach helps in customer retention. By the end of each interaction, the customers feel understood, appreciated and satisfied.
Remember one thing! Effective communication in a customer’s preferred language can directly influence his/her purchasing decisions. Customers are more comfortable in doing business transactions when they fully understand the product offerings and the company’s terms/policies in their language. Happy, well-served customers are more likely to return and spend more, boosting overall sales.
Around 70% of customers are likely to shift to a brand that provides content and support in their native language. Through multilingual customer service, you have a significant advantage in attracting and retaining your global customers, because here you can cater to a wider range of language preferences compared to those brands offering services in just one language.
Multilingual customer service enables businesses to connect with a diverse global audience. By offering support in multiple languages, you can tap into new markets where customers speak different languages. Even within a single country, there are communities that speak various local languages. By offering multilingual support, you can better serve these local markets and gain a competitive edge.
Multilingual customer service also enhances the operational efficiency of your customer support department. By providing support in the customer’s native language, and with support representatives already fluent in that language, the likelihood of errors, returns, and misunderstandings gets reduced. This results in fewer follow-up calls and faster issue resolution. Apart from that, clear and efficient communication enables support agents to address queries more effectively.
Nearly all communication channels businesses use today can be optimized to provide multilingual support. Below are the key channels to start with!
Key Customer Channels for Multilingual Support
A multilingual help center is an important support channel that allows businesses to provide self-service assistance through resources like knowledge bases, FAQ pages, tutorials, and manuals in multiple languages. It enables customers to independently solve basic issues and find answers to their queries without waiting for a support representative to reply.
Advanced features such as auto-translation tools, language-specific content organization, and AI-powered search make the help center more accessible and user-friendly for a global audience. Providing self-service content in multiple languages not only improves the overall customer experience but also reduces the volume of support tickets, allowing agents to dedicate their time to more complex queries and tasks.
Emails let customers express their concerns in detail and that too in their preferred language. Email is especially effective for addressing complex technical issues or follow-up inquiries, ensuring that communication remains clear and easily understandable in any language.
With modern email management tools, you can automatically route messages to language-specific agents who are fluent in the customer’s language, ensuring clear communication and quicker resolution. Since email remains a key communication channel, don’t forget to include your multilingual clients in your contact list.
Many time customers prefer speaking with a representative over the phone, particularly when dealing with complex or urgent matters. To meet their needs and expectations, you should have a call center infrastructure staffed with multilingual support agents.
By implementing an interactive voice response (IVR) system, you can direct customers to agents who speak their preferred language, making sure they feel heard and supported throughout the process.
Social media platforms are not only effective for increasing brand visibility but also for managing your customer support inquiries effectively. Many businesses are now offering multilingual customer support on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram. By providing support in multiple languages, businesses allow customers to communicate with the brands in the language they are most comfortable with, fostering a more relatable brand experience.
To engage with your global audience, providing multilingual support has become more than just a value-added service—it’s a necessity. Offering customer support in multiple languages ensures that you can cater to a diverse clientele, improve customer satisfaction, and build stronger relationships. But how to get started?
In this section, we have outlined 7 effective tips for implementing multilingual customer support, into your existing infrastructure.
7 Best tips to offer multilingual customer support
In the global marketplace, to offer top-notch customer service, you need to understand your audience’s language preferences. Begin with analyzing your website analytics, customer inquiries, feedback forms, and social media interactions.
These sources offer valuable insights into the languages your customers prefer. By analyzing this data, you can identify the key languages that most of your customers are comfortable with. Based on that you can design your support strategy to meet their needs effectively. This targeted approach ensures a more personalized and satisfying customer experience.
Next, hire support agents who can speak the local languages of specific regions. These agents not only understand the intricacies of the language but also have a deep knowledge of the region’s culture and customs. This cultural insight allows them to connect with customers on a more personal level, making the whole interaction more effective.
When recruiting, prioritize candidates who are fluent in both the language and the cultural nuances of the region they will serve. However, hiring the right agent is just the first part of it. You need to offer regular training sessions to develop and improve their customer service skills further. Equip your team with the tools and techniques needed to handle challenging scenarios with empathy and professionalism.
AI and chatbots can transform your customer experience (CX) strategies effectively, and when combined with translation services, they work wonders. Chatbots can offer real-time assistance to your customers and their efficiency increases significantly when paired with real-time translation. This integration allows customers to receive answers in their native language without waiting for a human agent.
REVE Chatbot is an excellent AI-powered solution from REVE Chat that enables you to offer multilingual support seamlessly across your website, mobile app, and other social media platforms. With advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), REVE Chatbot can be trained in any language, whether it’s English, Spanish, French, Arabic, or others. These models can adapt to new languages and emulate them, allowing your business to expand beyond local markets and engage with a global audience.
With REVE Chat’s flexible, AI-driven chatbot technology, you can provide exceptional multilingual support, ensuring that your customers receive timely, accurate responses in their preferred language, no matter where they are in the world.
Want to see how it works? SIGN UP for its free demo today!
Not all customers want to wait, many of them prefer to resolve issues on their own. This is where multilingual self-service options come in handy. A multilingual knowledge base can provide customers with help documentation, instruction manuals, FAQs, step-by-step guides, and other resources in their preferred language.
By empowering your customers to find solutions independently, you are in a win-win situation. Customers can access immediate answers to their queries, while your support team can focus on handling more complex issues. This improves overall efficiency and enhances the customer experience.
Another important strategy for offering multilingual customer support is aligning your business operating hours with the time zones of your global customers. No one likes reaching out for assistance, only to find out they have to wait for hours to get a response.
When dealing with customers from various regions, it’s important to understand that they may be in different time zones, possibly even on a different continent. They might need support when your team is offline. By clearly communicating your customer service hours, you can set proper response expectations and ensure that customers know when to reach out, regardless of their location. This transparency helps avoid frustration and improves the overall customer experience.
To improve customer support, you need to measure its quality. Use analytics to track important metrics such as response times, customer satisfaction scores, and ticket volumes separated by different languages.
When you review these KPIs regularly, you will be able to understand the improvement areas and highlight language gaps that may need attention. For example, if you notice longer response times in a specific language, you can allocate more resources to that language or improve your self-service options. By continuously optimizing your support quality, you can ensure your brand offers top-notch multilingual customer support, consistently exceeding customer expectations.
Many of us have started using Amazon Alexa and Google Home so do your customers. So optimizing your customer support content for voice search is a good strategy. For that, you need to ensure that your content is properly structured and tagged for voice search across all supported languages otherwise it can show irrelevant search results.
Also, create region-specific versions of your content for languages that have different accents or regional variations. This can help improve the accuracy of voice search, as voice assistants often interpret queries differently based on local dialects and pronunciations.
Whether you are interacting with a customer in Paris, Tokyo, or India, providing support in their native language always helps set your brand apart from competitors. In this section, we’ll explore how major industries, such as finance and the public sector, are utilizing REVE Chatbot to provide multilingual customer support, enhancing customer experiences and driving business growth.
The financial industry is also increasingly adopting multilingual customer support to meet the needs of its diverse global audience. In the case of handling complex issues such as various financial queries, account management, loan applications, and fraud prevention, offering assistance to customers in their preferred language is required to ensure clear communication and a seamless customer experience.
Example: Veritas Finance, a prominent financial institution in India, specializes in meeting the financial needs of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). By integrating advanced conversational chatbots, the company offers excellent customer service, delivering seamless support and deeply personalized experiences.
What truly distinguishes Veritas Finance is its adoption of the multilingual chatbot, enabling effective communication with customers across diverse linguistic backgrounds. This feature not only broadens their global reach but also fosters a sense of value and understanding for every customer.
The public sector also plays a critical role in serving communities from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Whether it’s assisting in processing legal documents or offering essential public services, the ability to communicate effectively in various languages has become important. Multilingual customer service ensures that language barriers do not create problems for people to access vital services.
Example: One of the key institutions of the Mexican Government, INAI, is dedicated to managing information requests, and public access to required government information. To effectively serve its diverse population, INAI has implemented a multilingual chatbot, offering support in both English and Spanish to ensure seamless communication with all citizens of Mexico.
This initiative has enabled INAI to bridge the language gap, reaching both Spanish and English-speaking audiences effortlessly. As a result, they have seen a remarkable 45% improvement in customer satisfaction, highlighting the impact of offering multilingual customer service effectively.
While gradually multilingual customer service is gaining more attention, it’s still rare for brands to offer support in a broad range of languages. If you are planning to expand your global presence and deliver exceptional, customer experiences, then offering multilingual service becomes mandatory.
Hiring a diverse team, clearly communicating service hours, and implementing best practices are some of the important strategies that you must include but trust me, you don’t have to navigate this journey alone. REVE Chat is here to help you transform your customer service across the diverse cultural groups your business serves, ensuring seamless and effective communication worldwide. To know more SIGN UP with us.
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Suvashree Bhattacharya is a researcher, blogger, and author in the domain of customer experience, omnichannel communication, and conversational AI. Serving as a content marketing strategist at REVE Chat, she develops contextual and interesting content for customers from different industries and segments like customer service, customer satisfaction, engagement, messaging platforms, etc. Passionate about writing and designing, she pours her heart out in writeups that are detailed, interesting, engaging, and more importantly cater to the requirements of the targeted audience. Her interests include reading, painting, and traveling.
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