Adopting multilingual customer service for your business

Multilingual live chat is something common that every company should consider when building the perfect customer service experience.

However, some companies still fail to do so when trying to improve the way they are dealing with their customers on a global scale.

74% of customers are more likely to do business with a brand that offers support in their language

Adopting a multilingual customer service from the beginning can lead a company to better results. Especially as modern communication channels and distribution services have made easier for businesses to get in touch with international markets.

Through this article, we'll show you why you should consider multilingual customer service, how to get started, and how to deal with little to no budget.

Benefits of Multilingual customer service

Enhance customer conversation

You've already been facing a sad customer experience conducted over your language. Now imagine facing a problem, using a language you're not mastering. Bummer, right?

When language becomes a wall, it can become a very stressful situation for both the agent and the customer.

This is where multilingual customer service steps in. With multiple contents available, you can serve everyone.

Increase customer retention

Did you know that customer service tends to define the customer's loyalty to a brand? Going the extra mile is the big thing when trying to seduce the right customer for your business.

Build your communication so it can flow easily, smoothly between the different steps of the customers' lifecycle.

Generates more leads

Companies tend to forget that great businesses drive growth thanks to word of mouth. Word of mouth is a powerful and yet unsuspected channel that can drive acquisition to a better level.

But wait, what is the link between lead generation and multilingual customer service?

It's dead simple, by offering multilingual customer service, you'll have the ability to serve content in different languages. By being indexed by search engines, you'll get more visibility related to the intent that drives awareness for your brand.

There are many more benefits to build a multilingual customer service but those are some of the most interesting.

Building a multilingual customer service

Starting with multilingual customer service, your company should think about translating content into different languages. The one that you're targeting.

Whether it's a marketing website, a knowledge base, or your own software, everything should be done to let users flow easily.

Having different translations for the same product is simple but can be hard to manage on a long-term basis because you'll have to maintain them when you modify everything.

For example, at Crisp, as we remain small, we've chosen not to translate our content on the knowledge base. However, our software is translated into 9 languages so our brand platform is.

Regarding live customer interactions, there are different solutions (in fact two): you hire someone that can talk multiple languages. Extremely valuable but difficult to hire.

You can use a customer service tool that offers a live chat with multilingual translation.

Here are some support tools that you should look at when building the perfect multilingual customer service:

• Shared inbox: Bring more collaboration inside your team.
• Social inbox: Centralize your messages from different channels.
• Knowledge base: Write articles about how to use your product.
• Live chat: Get in touch with your customers.
• Chatbots: Automate customer interaction in multiple languages.
• CRM: Get personal with your customers.

I'll specify with CRM, did you know that 62% of customers are waiting for you to know who they are before you get in touch with them?

That's a key point when building the best customer service experience.

These key tools can help your business to improve the way they are dealing with customers and also better handle multilingual support.

Multilingual customer service examples

Here are some examples of great multilingual customer service that are scaling all over the world.

Multilingual customer service checklist

Before we get started with the examples, here is a quick checklist to get you started with multilingual customer service:

✅ What are your customers' languages?
✅ What does their information research process look like?
✅ What are the customer service expectations for each culture?
✅ What time are customers supposed to get in touch with me?
✅ What shape is our longtail for those languages?

Once you're able to answer all these questions, you can start to build your customer service strategy along the way.

AirFrance

The French airline company is serving customers all around the world and there, has to adapt his communication depending on the origin of the customer.

Crisp

The customer messaging platform is serving customers all around the world, with more than 200 000 companies worldwide. As they scale their customer service, they offer both multilingual agents and a chat translation so they can fit with all the requirements.

On the other hand, their website is translated into more than 7 languages, and their software too. The only thing that isn't in their knowledge base is only available in English for efficiency purposes.

All this strategy helps the company to handle all those interactions without any phone support: only chat and emails with a team of 9 people.

If you ever want to use a translation app for your website, you can check Weglot, which has tons of integrations and will make your life even easier when building a better international customer service strategy.

Customer service is changing and companies have to adapt. It's not only efficient enough to build support that solves a problem, but you also have to adapt to each culture so everyone can have a great experience so the brand surpasses the initial expectations.