Multilingual customer support is considered one of the best ways to enter foreign markets and keep clients. Currently, many developing businesses understand this more and more as they are searching for new CS solutions. It's a simple case of speaking your customers' languages, and your business will grow. Though this requires resource allocation and expenditure, it can offer a quick payback.
Scaling internationally is a top-priority issue and a critical component of that expansion is having multilingual support. Although English is the most popular language online, it only represents 25% of the world's internet users. If companies want to expand to new countries, they must hire and train multilingual CS reps or ask for help from an experienced BPO.
In this post, we highlight the advantages of multilingual support and how you can use it to expand your business operations.
Multilingual customer support is about client assistance that involves a variety of languages, helping businesses to provide consistent and high-quality service to a diverse clientele.
The modern digital marketplace is changing quickly making companies more interested in expansion and interacting with different customers who prefer communicating in languages other than English. You can observe this difference in the United States, where the linguistic diversity is enormous, with residents speaking more than 350 different languages.
If a business restricts its communication to English only, it runs the risk of excluding a big part of the population, which will lead to losing valuable client interactions. This lack of inclusivity can have negative consequences, extending beyond user dissatisfaction to affect the company’s ability to attract and retain customers.
In order to improve CX, it is crucial to have and actively use multilingual customer support. This approach ensures that assistance is readily available to those who feel more at ease communicating in their native language, showing a devotion to customer care that solves language difficulties.
The world is getting "smaller" and more connected as brands expand globally. We saw an increase of 16.8% in worldwide commerce sales, and that number will only go up. Latin America saw a rise of 25% in e-commerce sales, India's e-commerce market is on track to double by 2025, and the UK and the Philippines saw a growth of 20%. Expanding globalization brings communication challenges and requires brands to communicate with their international consumers in their native language.
A great number of businesses have not made the shift toward implementing multilingual customer service or simply lack the necessary resources to provide customer support in different languages. Catering to only one or two languages may work for some time, but it won’t cut it if you're aiming for vivid growth and broader adoption of your products or services.
For companies striving to cast a wider net globally and grab a big part of the market they could reach, it's crucial to start laying down the groundwork for providing multilingual customer support and staying close to their target audience.
Wondering if it's the right time to integrate a multilingual call center into your customer service strategy? Here are some obvious signs to direct you to the way you need:
Deciding to add different languages to your customer service can really boost your business's ability to connect with people worldwide, make your users happier, and help your business do better overall. So, if you're seeing these signs, you might want to think about making your call center able to handle more languages. Your customers from different countries will be really grateful.
Expanding into global markets is a significant stride for any business, aiming to make its products or services available to a broader audience. In this process, language emerges as a crucial bridge connecting different cultures and customer bases.
As we come to the key benefits of incorporating multilingual customer support, it is essential to recognize its role as a strategic investment that leads to stable growth, enhanced client relationships, and a robust brand presence across diverse regions.
Consumers want to communicate in their native language. Over 75% of customers are more willing to buy from a brand that can support them in their native language after the sale. Using Google Translate or hiring someone to translate your knowledge base or FAQ pages to other languages is not enough. You must have a customer support team that speaks the language fluently and has a deep knowledge of all the cultural nuances, references, and slang of each region where you want to expand.
When you offer support in different languages, you get more customer feedback, which ultimately helps you to improve your product or service. The more access you have to that data, the better you can serve your clients, which provides a powerful loop of product enhancement and growth.
In many companies, the users influence the development of new features and the trajectory of the product map. It's vital to keep the pulse on the customer's evolving needs and achieve the optimal product-market fit to solve them. Multilingual customer support sets the foundation to be able to get that feedback from the client.
Multilingual customer service opens the door for B2B and B2C companies to sell in new regions. For instance, B2B companies with tech products with many features often need to provide detailed support in multiple languages to international customers. Not only would they need to create help docs and instructional videos in different languages, but they would also need to provide tech support in multiple languages to provide personalized guidance to users.
Additionally, B2C companies may find that their products are used differently around the world. For example, McDonald's menu is slightly different in India than in France. The company adds food items that are popular in each country and region, depending on the culture of that area. It's easy to see why other B2C companies that have to tailor their products to different international markets would need multilingual customer support to connect with users.
Another essential benefit of having multilingual customer support is that it can dramatically improve sales. For example, if you are an eCommerce brand that sells on Amazon and wants to expand to a new region or country, you need to translate all of your content into a new language and have a multilingual team to support those clients. This could easily double or triple the sales growth of any eCommerce company.
According to Statista, e-commerce sales will reach 22% of all retail sales worldwide by 2024, up from 18% in 2020. Unlike the days of brick-and-mortar stores being the only option, it takes very little for a client to switch from one retailer to the next if they're not happy. When the barrier to a positive customer experience is language, the user will most likely abandon the transaction before confirming any purchase.
The rise in online purchasing has been driven by various factors, among them social media. This means sales increase when satisfied customers spread the word, and complaints on social media can drive others away. Suppose the lack of multi-lingual support has turned people off. In that case, they are more likely to spread negative sentiment online, which can diminish a brand's reputation and discourage purchases.
Multilingual customer care empowers your brand to get ahead of the competition. If other businesses in your market are lagging in this area, then this is your opportunity to shine. A recent survey by Intercom shows that 35% of people are willing to switch products to brands that offer support in their native language which means you can take on your competitors head-on and expand your market share.
Competing on product differentiation or boosted customer service experience is a much better strategy than competing on price. It changes the entire conversation.
Clearly, it's impossible to offer support in the more than 7,000 languages spoken globally. However, brands should know that more than half of the global population speaks just 23 languages, with 40% of the world's languages spoken by less than 1,000 speakers. With this in mind, brands can analyze their target audiences to understand which languages are most common. That way, companies can provide targeted support for the right languages, reach the most people possible, and differentiate themselves from competitors.
Expanding to new regions is not all about the short-term impact. It can dramatically impact the long-term growth of any company. Think of international expansion as a brand awareness initiative. A company expands to a new region, gets access to thousands of new consumers, and potentially gets millions of impressions across its content marketing and advertising initiatives. Over time, that impact adds up, and people begin to recognize the logo or the brand name, slowly becoming a household brand.
Customers who receive assistance in their native language are more likely to remain loyal to a brand, leading to increased customer lifetime value. They tend to make repeat purchases, recommend the brand to others, and provide positive reviews and testimonials on different reputable platforms. This not only helps in retaining existing clients but also plays a crucial role in attracting new ones, contributing to the overall profitability and success of the business.
Studies show that 80% of customers are willing to switch brands because of poor customer service. And it turns out that a whopping 70% of customers are more loyal to brands that offer assistance in their native language. To expand to a new region successfully, companies must provide a high level of support in that region's native language(s).
And no, a translated FAQ page won't do the job. Clients crave that real interaction with a customer service rep who speaks their language. In fact, 29% of businesses say they've lost users because they don't offer multilingual customer support.
A multilingual customer support team reflects a brand’s commitment to inclusivity and diversity. It shows that the brand values all its consumers, regardless of their language or cultural background, and is willing to go the extra mile to cater to their specific needs. This not only enhances the brand’s image but also contributes to building a more inclusive and diverse business environment.
Offering support in multiple languages means that customer inquiries can be resolved more quickly. When users contact support, they are looking for immediate help. If they have to wait for a translator or for someone who speaks their language to be available, it could lead to frustration and a poor CX. Multilingual support ensures that there is always someone available to help, regardless of the language the client speaks, leading to faster resolution times and raised customer loyalty and contentment.
It is clear that in the booming digital economy, any business that wants to grow internationally must offer customer service in multiple languages. Without multilingual support, sales can stagnate as loyalty declines, making it easy for competitors to swoop in. However, communicating with customers in various languages can create a distant advantage that better positions your brand to thrive in a global marketplace while offering the human touch people appreciate.
While building a multilingual support team in-house may be challenging, outsourcing to a trusted service provider like Helpware can provide a way forward. We have offices in 10 countries worldwide and continue to grow. Our multilingual customer service agents are fluent in over 20 languages, and we have already serviced more than 250 clients across various industries and locations.
At Helpware we use the most up-to-date support tools, customer service software, and automation systems to provide top-notch call or live chat outsourcing services for more quick and effective interaction. To find out more about how your business can grow its multilingual customer support, visit Helpware.com.