If you work in the tech industry, you know that your products will likely be in demand worldwide. While this can be great for your sales numbers, it can also present potential difficulties with language barriers. The most obvious of these is that people in different countries might not speak English. And let’s face it: tech products and tech companies can be complicated. So it will definitely boost your company’s brand and help increase your sales numbers if you can create multilingual customer support materials.
Let’s take a closer look at what some of these tools involve, and the benefits that you can gain from using them.
What is multilingual tech support
Multilingual customer support is a system that companies create to address the needs of their customers in whatever language they communicate in. It is intended to reach people in diverse parts of the world so that they can fully utilize any given company’s services.
Having a multilingual support team can include things such as answering customer questions by means of chatbots, providing guidance on how to find or use things, troubleshooting, or any number of other customer-related tasks that serve a multilingual knowledge base and provide for an improved customer experience.
Is it difficult to create multilingual customer support?
Not at all. As soon as you decide what languages you want to work with, all you have to do is find the right software where you can utilize translation tools, and start translating. What languages you choose to work with all depend on your potential customer base and which languages you think will be most beneficial for your business.
If there is a significant enough percentage of potential customers within a given geographical region, you should consider including the local language within your translations. Just be sure to know what languages people actually use! Sometimes people live in places where former colonial languages still have official status but they don’t actually use them. Or the opposite.
Then you should think about the tools that you have in English, and go about translating each of them systematically so that the whole scope of your online tools is available to customers worldwide. For example, if you have a library of training videos, you can use any of today’s AI solutions to translate a videos.
Benefits of multilingual customer support
There are benefits to be gained from offering multilingual guide and tutorial support both for customers and for businesses. For customers, the benefits are clear: Guides are created to help people navigate difficult tasks. In other words, tasks that are already difficult in people’s native languages can become almost impossible if people can’t read them easily. So the translating of guides into different languages for improved customer support content is a must for successful tech endeavors.
The same is true of tutorials. The purpose of tutorials is to teach, of course. And while some tutorials can be made visual and illustrate processes by means of video, it is almost always better to have voice accompaniment in people’s preferred language for better overall language services.
Benefits of multiple languages support for companies
There are also many benefits of multilingual customer support to be gained from companies, including:
- Better customer satisfaction rates due to customers’ more easily being able to navigate material in multiple languages
- Higher conversion rates among global consumers who see your business as a worthwhile one to use
- Better SEO, particularly in parts of the world that use other languages as their primary language in search engines
- Higher sales growth due to more products and services sold
What kinds of multilingual customer service tools are most common?
1. Live chats
Live chats can be extremely helpful in guiding customers through whatever difficulties they might be having. Chat experts can work with customers to provide the necessary steps to take them through a whole process. If live chats are offered 24 hours a day, it can greatly increase the amount of business that a given company receives. It helps to build relationships with new customers and existing ones, and ultimately keep them coming back to the company. If managed correctly, people can simply click on a live chat button and then choose their language.
2. Over-the-phone interpretation
Another option is to have interpreters on hand to help your existing customer support agents. This is known as over-the-phone interpretation (OPI). In this scenario, rather than programming your website with language programs, you can have actual people present to provide interpretation when necessary to existing support staff.
3. Chat bots
Chat bots are becoming a big thing these days. These electronic devices can also be programmed into different languages, with different types of knowledge to better serve customers of a greater variety and native speakers of different languages. Sophisticated bots not only know how to speak different languages, but they know how to ask the right follow up questions and address customers appropriately.
4. Written guides
When it comes to providing written guides, both customer service agents and readily available guides should be accessible in different languages to guide users in their customer journey. You can have your company’s guides available on your website simply by clicking on a link and choosing the language that a customer wants to read a guide in.
5. Guided tutorials
As mentioned above, tutorials can be tricky. Not only should they be translated into other languages, but they should be made accessible in a step-by-step manner. Providing video tutorials that allow people to move forward and backwards throughout the course of a given tutorial is particularly useful.
These are just a few of the technology solutions that you can create with translation services into other languages. Whatever your company directions might be, you can make them more accessible to a wider section of the population by increasing your language base.
Conclusion
There are many benefits to be gained for both companies and customers from translating guides and other online tools into other languages. If you are a business owner, it would be to your benefit to research where your potential customer base is globally and take the time to translate your literature and online tools into the languages that will best reach your target group. You will surely see the results in increased customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates, and increased sales within a short period of time.
