Your product might be brilliant. Your team might be the best. But without multilingual customer support, your success can only ever be played out on a confined stage.
In a globalised market, only supporting English-speaking customers is limiting. Plus, it’s plain bad business. Here’s why you need to look beyond English alone and start reaping the benefits of multilingual customer support.
• Customer service accessibility
Accessibility in customer service is all about being easy to contact and easy to communicate with. Without multilingual customer support, you’re only ever accessible to a subset of people.
With it, however, you open up your business. You don’t discriminate against customers based on their language, and become more welcoming to more of your potential audience.
• Improved customer experience
Multilingual customer support leads to a better experience for the customer. Firstly, they don’t feel shut out from your service, or put off by communication barriers.
But beyond the obvious, they also get a quicker and more convenient support journey. The customer faces no delay, nor creates any disturbance, as they seek support. Instead, they get fluid access to help — all in their language of choice.
• Faster business
Next, multilingual customer support will speed up your business. Language barriers eat up time and hamper productivity. That’s not to mention the frustration they birth.
So, removing those language barriers helps your service wheels run a little smoother. Your customer service department becomes that bit more efficient, that bit more productive, and that bit more well-oiled.
• Customer service consistency
Part of offering well-oiled customer service is consistency. Unfortunately, that can be hard to ensure without a multilingual customer support offering.
Being able to communicate in languages beyond English helps you avoid crossed wires. You avoid misunderstanding, and create a more uniform, universal customer service front.
• Bottom line boost
Did you know that 80% of customers desire care in their own language? Or that 72% of customers are more likely to buy when information is available in their language?
Providing multilingual customer support is just good sales sense. If you can speak to more prospects, you can sell to more prospects.
• Bigger global footprint
This leads to the next point: a multilingual customer support function extends your global footprint. It allows you to grow – and better serve – an international customer base.
Plus, multilingual capacity means you can target high-growth areas. By speaking the customer’s language, you can extend into lucrative foreign markets such as China and the Middle East.
• Enhanced brand reputation
Money aside, providing multilingual customer support is great for your brand reputation. It’s easy to ship products and services online. But supporting those international customers after the sale can be trickier.
So, multilingual customer support shows a commitment to the customer and their post-sale aftercare. In turn, you build a reputation as a trusted brand that cares.
• A competitive edge
The ability to offer multilingual customer support is a key differentiator. Only a minority of businesses are currently doing so.
This presents a huge opportunity for early adopters to shine – leading the way in the UK as well as becoming more of a contender in the global marketplace.
Multilingual customer support: are you ready?
You don’t need to hire masses of interpreters to achieve your multilingual goals. Nor do you need to set up offshore call centres in every country you want to target.
Instead, you can take advantage of technology like real-time live chat translation to start supporting your customers in multiple languages. A live chat solution complete with language translation automatically opens up your business in 100+ languages. Even better, it does so without the expense of pulling in mass human resources.
To start giving multilingual customer support via live chat software, start your free trial of WhosOn today.
Useful links
WhosOn real-time live chat translation
Key translation statistics to consider in your customer service strategy