Multilingual Support: Speak Your Customer's Language Multilingual support comes with its benefits, such as accessing a wider market and building loyalty. Let's look at how companies can get closer to their customers by speaking their language
By Gaurav Singh
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Globalization has opened the doors to a wider market but also increased competition and a need to diversify customer connectivity. The biggest disappointment a business might face in customer satisfaction is the inability to communicate in their language. After all, 75 per cent of customers prefer to buy from brands that offer product information in their native language.
The Middle East is one the most linguistically diverse regions with more than 60 spoken languages. In addition to the local languages, people speak English as a business language, thanks to its status as the global business centre. In such cases, multilingual support is a must.
What is multilingual support?
Multilingual support allows brands to serve customers in more than one language. There are around 7,100 languages spoken in the world today. With such a huge diversity, a business must mature to assist its global customer base with multilingual support.
Around 71.5 per cent of customer service leaders claim a boost in CSAT when they connect in customer's native language.
While a brand cannot offer every piece of information in all languages, extending the communication of the important aspects in the native language can act as a boon.
A gap in multi-language customer support
We know multilingual support is important, but there is a great gap in expectations and reality. Only 19 per cent of the customer contact centres offer support in multiple languages. Employing staff that can handle customers based on the linguistics needs is not only extensive but also expensive.
But why is multilingual support important to a business? For every company, keeping customers happy is the topmost priority. There are many ways to do that; one of them is speaking their language. It helps a company to:
Increase sales: Nearly 74 per cent of customers are willing to buy again from the brand if offered after-sales service in the native language. It's because their faith in the brand increases and has a positive impact on sales and upsells.
Access wider market: As the businesses expand their services to wider regions, a multilingual contact centre can help them tap the market quickly. Around 70 per cent of the customers worldwide offered positive feedback about the brands that provide multilingual customer services.
Create loyalty and trust: Businesses who take the effort to speak their customer's languages earn their trust and loyalty. This will result in long-term benefits of higher retention rates and LTV.
Smoothen communication: If the customers don't understand the brand's language, there are chances of miscommunication. Multilingual support can help avoid such mistakes and smoothen communication.
Though there are various benefits of multilingual support, a business needs to ask: How do you use multilingual support?
How do you adopt multilingual support?
Multilingual customer service is easier than ever to embrace. While adopting multilingual support, one needs to focus on some key considerations to ensure it's effective. The first thing that a brand needs to be aware of is the various methods through which one can incorporate multilingual support. The most common of them are: translation tools, hire talent, localize important pages and multilingual chatbot support.
The simplest and easiest way is to incorporate the multilingual chatbot in your support operations. Offer customers options to select their preferred language, both in chat and voice formats.
Benefits of multilingual conversational chatbots
It's well known by now that chatbots alone can cut operational costs for companies by around 30 per cent. By adding the costs of multilingual support, we can assume the savings will be more if self-service is also multilingual. Some benefits include:
- Using multilingual conversational AI allows customers to select their choice of language and communicate with the brand.
- Offering information in the customer's preferred language personalizes their conversations and leads to higher conversion rates.
- Integrating self-service support with a multilingual knowledge base increases CSAT and creates better leads in the funnel.
- Routing the chat to an agent proficient in the customer's language ensures continuity of a great customer experience.
Multilingual support: A friend to businesses and customers
A Common Sense Advisory study of customers in 10 countries suggested that 60 per cent of consumers rarely make purchases from English-only sites. Around 67 per cent prefer navigation and content in the native language. And 75 per cent make purchases in their native language.
With the growing demand for better and superior technologies that offer support to businesses and customers, multilingual support is crucial. With the global market becoming diverse, making the customer experience effortless is more important.
A great symbol to show that the brand is committed to customers' individuality, multilingual live chat can classify the brand as a trusted one that cares about its customers.
