Do you have a multi-lingual support team? Then you know it can be hard to find suitable agents, but at the same time, how much value it brings to your customers. Let’s review how to improve operations and let your multi-lingual customer support succeed.
Multi-lingual support means extending your customer support to include languages other than your native language or the language you’ve chosen as the company language. It’s a great way to include more people, giving them a language choice when they contact you online or call you. After choosing their preferred language, they get transferred to a support person that knows their language.
Businesses of today are international
Business is increasingly international today. And with customers worldwide, that naturally means reaching people with different native languages. Even though you cannot meet all language desires, as currently 7,151 languages are spoken today, you can adjust to those markets with the most customers and future potential.
Customers also have higher expectations today. Since the pandemic, customer service has significantly transformed, resulting in customers with high demands on a smooth buyer’s journey. But there are many ways to meet these expectations, even when operating customer service work in remote settings.
3 reasons to invest in multi-lingual support
Investing in multi-lingual support means better adjustment to increased customer demands. Without it – you risk losing customers to other brands that offer support in their native language.
1. Access to more markets
Multi-lingual support is beneficial if your company operates internationally, with customers speaking many different languages, as you can potentially reach more customers.
2. Happier customers
As many people are monolingual, this might be the only chance to communicate with them. But, also multi-lingual customers will appreciate it if they can choose their preferred customer service language and will value that you gave them a choice.
3. Increased customer service
Another more direct benefit of multi-lingual support is that you can resolve more support tickets by speaking with customers in a language they can easily understand. You increase efficiency as your support team can most likely reduce the time to resolution by eliminating the need for translation or potential miscommunication with the customer.
Keep reading: Why customer service teams should measure first-contact resolution
Possible challenges with international support
Finding the right employees
Obviously, multi-lingual customer service means hiring multi-lingual employees. Depending on the size of your business, you might need to find employees who can comfortably work in several languages, or build up specific teams with staff dedicated to certain languages. Finding staff with the right language skills is challenging but worthwhile in the long run.
Content production
The more languages you work in, the more content production you need to do. Ideally, everything you produce will be available in all languages, both internally and externally. This means you must spend more time on things like translations, quality control, and keeping all support documents updated.
Managing multiple channels
With more languages come more channels. The best way to handle multiple channels is through an omnichannel contact center, where you get a unified way of communicating with customers, regardless of if they’re contacting you by email, phone, in English, or Spanish.
Getting customers to the right person
You cannot forward all incoming issues to just anyone in the support team when you offer multi-lingual support - they need to reach the right person quickly. But an easy way of solving that issue is using a communication platform that allows for smart routing. That makes it easy for agents to see who is available and route calls or messages to the right person.
Conclusion: operate a multi-lingual support team properly
If you’ve decided on investing in multi-lingual customer support, the best way forward is to begin by looking into your communication solution.
PBX
Choose a PBX solution that enables smart routing. That way, agents can direct customers to the correct department and language based on their previous information, or use digital solutions to forward their calls to the right place.
For instance, you can add a voice message, targeting several languages, asking the customer to choose, like “for English, press 2”.
Programmability
Another clever feature to look for in a PBX solution is programmability. It’s a powerful solution to design automated call workflows. Your customers get to talk to the person best suited to take the call, as the system detects the customer number and directs them to the right queue instantly, so your agent can focus on what’s important.
Omnichannel
An omnichannel contact center also allows you to manage all communication on one platform. So, even if you have people working in multiple languages, you get a clear overview.
With omnichannel, you allow for a more personal approach, regardless of language and in which channel the customers choose to contact you. You’ll have a unified way of communicating and smoother customer interactions in general.
If you’re interested in more information, take a look at Telavox’s omnichannel contact center. And feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
