Why Does A Business Need Multilingual Customer Support?

With nearly 2 billion online shoppers surfing the internet daily, there is a certainty that some of them will attempt to contact customer service. And since over 75% of the world does not speak English, there is also a very high chance that those same customers will be connected with a representative they don’t fully understand.

The reason this is important to understand is because nearly 40% of buyers reconsider their purchasing decision if the service is not in their local language. For an ecommerce platform, this margin is simply unacceptable since it basically means that almost half of the website visitors will bounce off. For other types of businesses, the loss of customers can be even more damaging.

In this article, we ask a simple question: why is multilingual support so essential?

Multilingual customer service entails entertaining customers from all across the globe, irrespective of their region or language. This poses a challenge since you need to assemble a team of bilingual and multilingual agents. While it is certainly an investment, multilingual support also serves as a mediator to open additional doors of opportunity for your business. It also helps build a strong relationship with customers who speak a different language. According to CSA Research, 74% of customers are willing to buy again if they receive after-sales support in their regional language. Multilingual customer support is crucial for establishing your brand in other countries or targeting specific overseas markets.

Miscommunication, unsatisfied customer query and misinterpretation can all hurt your customer base. For most businesses, building trust with clients is an important step to keep customers coming back and spreading good word of mouth. Multilingual support is key for accomplishing this in overseas markets and companies avoid the risk of losing customers.

Emotions drive 95% of sales decisions. Creating a loyal customer base starts with making sure that every call, every online query and every interaction clients have with your brand leaves them satisfied. Even clients that don’t end up making a purchase might be enticed to return or tell an acquaintance about the great experience they had with you. It’s always paramount to focus on creating a great experience for your customer. Your product or service might be really well made, but unless it is delivered exceptionally well, it’s all for nothing. Poor customer service costs businesses up to $75 billion every year and something that can simply not be ignored.

One of the ways companies are dealing with language differences is by using online translation tools. While this gets the job done, it comes at a significant cost; time. Relaying information back and forth can be too time consuming and, most of the time, enough to discourage customers from locking their purchase. It’s always better to have bilingual agents answering these calls and to have the proper call forwarding procedure in place so that clients can be entertained fast and without delay. Not only is this a much more efficient use of time, it also has the added benefit of saving cost on translation software, whose licenses are much more expensive than the rate of a single multilingual agent. Not only that, but it frees up the time of your administrative and technical staff to focus on other matters.

It’s important to understand that every interaction with a client is a learning experience. Not only are you understanding your audience better, you are also gathering precious information that could help you improve your products and services. BPO’s can provide the necessary infrastructure and software integration that help you record valuable metrics such as call duration, client satisfaction rating, response time etc. Analysis of this information can be invaluable in helping you understand what’s lacking in your business.

This is even more important with multilingual support. Trying to conduct business overseas can be tough since it’s akin to navigating uncharted territory. But with a more quantitative approach, your business can find the gaps quickly and address them accordingly to catch up to local competition.

Arguably the biggest advantage multilingual customer support gives you is the ability to establish your products and services in overseas markets. By far the biggest obstacle to foreign expansion is the language barrier. Even the largest brands have struggled to make their name well-known overseas and it is partly due to not being able to connect with their language, culture and ideology. It is not just about knowing the language, it is about understanding your target audience at a personal level in order to address their pain-points within your marketing strategy. This is something that is much easier if you entrust your multilingual call center to a third-party that is already experienced and operating in your desired region.

This is the best way to build the most valuable asset for your company: customer trust. According to Unbabel’s Global Multilingual CX Report 2021, almost one-quarter of clients are unlikely to spend more than $500 if they do not obtain adequate language support. Not only can sales agents persuade customers better, but the positive experience will surely net you good word of mouth which will in-turn lead to even more customers coming to your business in that region.

The above-mentioned are just a few of the uncountable reasons why businesses need multilingual support services. Multilingual support is not just limited to large enterprises, but is also something SMB’s can deploy at a cost-effective manner. Be sure to get the right partner when looking for a call center service provider that can help you with the aforementioned support service.

With IdeasUnlimited, you get award-winning multilingual call center services driven by a staff that has excelled for more than 11 years in the industry. With more than 400 clients served, we are ready to turn your business into the success story you envision. To get started, simply head over to our contact us page, or email us at sales@ideasunlimitedonline.com.