Why offer multilingual customer support?

As your organization grows and you start serving multiple geographies, there is an absolute need to offer multilingual customer support. Language cannot be a barrier anymore. In fact, offering support in the native language of your customer can increase the likeliness of repeat purchase by 73% and research shows that customers are interested in paying more to receive information and support in their native languages. While the need for multilingual support is established, let us look at the key aspects you need to know to succeed in offering multilingual support.

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Essential tips for multilingual customer support

 

Identify the level of customer support needed

You need to decide the markets for which you need to offer multilingual support. It can be based on the number of customers in a geography, market potential and so on. You also need to consider the type of support requests received, to know the level of support required in that region. If you are an enterprise with a mature market presence, you need to invest in building a local team consisting native speakers within the specified region or country.

Localize your self-service support

One of the critical components of multilingual support is to offer self-service content in the local language, so that you enable the customers to help themselves. This includes localizing your knowledge base, how-to’s, FAQs, onboarding content, videos, and more. And more importantly, make sure you invest professionally on translating the content and not rely on browser based auto-translations. Also it makes sense to notify your customers that the content is being translated, because it’s possible that some nuances may not be linguistically correct when transliterated. Also, as you begin to gear up your support content for multilingual support, remember to incorporate a lot of images. It can help your customers understand the instructions better.  

Establish cross-cultural understanding

Building your multilingual support is not just about language translation but also about establishing a strong understanding of cultural aspects too. For instance, it’s important to what’s the acceptable time duration before which it’s not advisable to attempt a cross-sell.

 

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Customer support, while largely seen as a component of customer success, is a complete function on it’s own that focuses on resolving customer issues related to your product. Customer success, is a proactive approach to building relationships with existing customers.

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