Customer support is considered to be a vital component in all businesses, but within a multi-lingual setting, speaking your customers’ language is essential to enable clear understanding, promote brand value, and encourage repeat custom.
At a basic level, good customer service relies on clear communication which is why being able to speak your customers’ language is essential for understanding.
Assuming that all customers are fluent enough in English to be able to communicate any issues, problems or queries shows a lack of regard and a profit-centric organisation. Whereas, offering localised customer support highlights a business that is customer-focused and adds brand value.
Multilingual customer support adds the following important factors to your business:
1. Increased Customer Satisfaction
It may seem an obvious point, but it is also one of the most important – your customers are more satisfied if they can communicate with your business in their native language.
If you can speak their lingo, they can understand what you are communicating to them in after sales care, promotional material, FAQ, chat bots, and so on.
These factors are vital in ensuring customer satisfaction and make all the difference in repeat sales by adding brand value.
2. Personal Communication Value
The rise in automated call centres, chat bots and AI customer interaction in general, has had a negative impact on personalisation for most large organisations.
Recent research completed by Customer Contact Week (CCW) highlighted this issue as one that requires attention. The question they feel is most relevant is how do we “humanise the customer experience?”
According to the CCW report, in order to improve customer personalisation businesses must ensure that “the experience they create should reflect the extent to which the business understands and values its individual customers. They are one in a million, not one of a million.
The way to do this is through localisation and translation of all customer facing support elements.
Translation will provide a language your customer can understand and with which they can interact, while localisation offers specific regional content that is tailored to your audience’s requirements, behaviours, purchasing habits, and cultural differences.
Localisation offers the ability to connect with customers in a way which is most relevant and natural for them.
3. Increased Trade Through Translation
Ecommerce has changed forever the way we shop and do business.
It is now relatively straight forward for a company in the UK to do business in virtually every other country in the world, without even leaving their head office.
However, the key to a successful global business is translation.
Translation enables interaction with customers around the world, ensuring they can connect with your business, brand and products or services.
Without translation, and especially professional translation, it is easy to cause misunderstandings, offence, or lose custom through poorly translated websites and promotional materials.
Research has shown that there is a “substantial preference for the consumer’s mother tongue” when shopping online, and that those consumers with a limited command of the English language will “avoid English-language sites, spend less time during their visits, and not buy products that lack instructions or post-sales customer support in their language”.
Multilingual websites, which have quality translation and localisation applied to them, offer the opportunity to increase sales through interaction with new markets, and gain repeat sales by satisfied customers.
It is worth noting that the above list only offers the top three reasons for using multilingual customer services, however, there are many more reasons why this is vital such as, removing anxiety for consumers, increasing brand awareness and loyalty, increasing sales within the company’s native country through increased communication with non-native residents, and brand prestige.
Multilingual customer support can improve your chance of success in global markets, giving you the upper hand over competitors.
If you would like to discuss your plans for multilingual customer support, please contact the experts here at Creative Word and we can help you realise your goal.
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