How do you support a multilingual knowledge base?
Did you know that 74% of customers are more likely to repurchase or use services again when the customer service is available in their native language? It's time to support a multilingual knowledge base for your company. Discover how.
With the internet, borders have disappeared, making the market global and allowing businesses to think international from day 1.
The one language adopted by the business ecosystem is English. Everyone is aware of it and tries to use it more or less.
That's why companies have adopted a customer service strategy that offers English, systematically.
However, many people from different countries are not comfortable speaking English to get in touch with companies, especially when it comes to customer support.
Encountering a problem, explaining an issue, or reading a knowledge base article in a language you don't master isn't easy.
Building a multilingual customer support strategy is an efficient and powerful way of dealing with non-English speaking people.
Did you know that 74% of customers are more likely to repurchase or use services again when the customer service is available in their native language?
One of the critical assets in this strategy is the ability to support a multilingual knowledge base strategy.
Now that you get it, we will talk about the good and the bad regarding multilingual help articles and how they can be supported within companies.
Problems with a multilingual help center
Building a multilingual help center isn't for every company. Some problems must be known before to any development.
Multilingual help center requires native speakers
Willing to craft a multilingual knowledge system for your customers? You'd better have that lovely employee able to translate your articles. It's essential to have it internally because if someone from the outside does it, the guide might miss some key components.
Willing to offer a good multilingual knowledge base? Hire agents that can speak that language too.
Multilingual help center multiplies costs
Let's say you have one knowledge base in French and that you're willing to create 5 other knowledge bases, each a different language. It means 6x more work for your teams.
Thinking about publishing a new feature? Six articles to create. Thinking about updating an article? 6 articles to update.
Multilingual help center requires the product/service to be translated too!
What is the point of going halfway? If you're building a help center containing dedicated articles, you should consider translating your product.
It might even be the first thing to avoid the customer getting in touch with your customer support.
Most of the time, this is the part where most of the request comes from. Start by translating your product or service to make things easier for your existing customers.
Benefits of a multilingual help center
Building a multilingual help center also has some exciting benefits. Here are some of them that could help you make the switch.
A Multilingual knowledge base will make you more visible in key markets
By writing content in dedicated languages, you improve your visibility on specific markets.
Even if these are helpful articles, we hope you've thought about translating your website too so you make your product visible on the whole customer journey.
A Multilingual knowledge base will decrease the amount of requests your receive
By making your help articles available in your customers' language, you allow your customers to be more autonomous.
It is enabling your team to handle less painful conversations.
Multilingual knowledge base will make your customers happier
As a French company, at Crisp, we have many French customers asking us:"but as a French company, why don't you write the content in french?". 😂
That is a question of scale, as a small team, we can't take the time to translate our knowledge base articles, even if it's to one language.
With more than 200 help articles, that would be way too time-consuming.
The thing is, if you do, you'll make your customers very happy.
Tools to build the best multilingual knowledge base
Hopefully, tools are here to help companies to be more efficient. Here is a list of tools we can imagine to be helpful when supporting a multilingual knowledge base.
Weglot
Weglot is a powerful tool that helps you to translate your articles into more than 114 languages.
It's fully automated so you don't have to worry about it. You just have to change your screenshots to make it fit with your customer's intents.
Crisp
Crisp is a multilingual customer support software that offers the ability to build a multilingual knowledge base. It comes with a live translate feature so you can speak with each customer in their own language. No need to hire that special agent that knows how to speak brazilian.
Now that you understand how to support a multilingual knowledge base, it may be time, or not, to get started with it.