Top 5 Reasons to Provide Multilingual Customer Support

Ecommerce allows businesses to significantly expand their reach and sell their products or services anywhere. But to turn potential customers into actual customers, and to truly scale your business globally, you need to speak the language of your customers. Research confirms this, with 76% of online shoppers reporting that they prefer buying products with information in their native language. This extends to beyond just your online product descriptions and checkout flow. Since Customer Contact Week Europe starts today, we decided to explore the benefits of multilingual customer support. Here’s 5 reasons why your company should interact with customers in their own language.

In a saturated market, it can be tricky to tie customers to your brand. They often and easily switch brands when a better offer arises. So what does it take to encourage brand loyalty? It turns out multilingual customer support plays a huge role. In their Can’t Read, Won’t Buy survey, CSA Research found that 75% of customers are more likely to purchase from the same brand again if customer support is available in their language.

Your customers will always have questions or encounter problems. Perhaps your company employs a team of support agents, but they cannot possibly handle every single issue, because they don’t speak the language or simply because of the volume. With localized self-service support options, you allow multilingual customers to solve many of their own problems and minimize tickets from international customers. Plus, advanced solutions for chat and email translation enable your agents to increase their productivity and response times.

Even before the buying stage, the availability of multilingual customer support can influence potential customers. When customers are still in the process of deciding, they may dropout pre-purchase if they cannot find localized answers to their questions, for instance about international delivery times and options. You can easily convince these potential buyers and improve your conversion rates with an FAQ page in multiple languages.

When making purchase decisions, price is not the only factor customers consider. Sometimes they choose a more expensive option if they feel the brand is more trustworthy or offers better service. Offering information and support options in their native language makes them feel valued and more confident about their purchase, especially if they have concerns about their foreign language skills.

Accepting support requests from international customers provides an opportunity to collect more feedback about your product or service. Gaining insight into customer needs is important for a successful global expansion, since these needs can vary across markets. Extensive feedback will help you continuously improve your product or service as customer demands change over time.

Ideally, you would have a team of native support agents in every language and time zone, but that might not (yet) be part of your business plan and budget. Not to worry: there are lots of other ways to offer multilingual customer support. Offering self-service support options, such as your FAQ page and online Help section, in multiple languages is a great place to start. Next, you can explore integrations and automated translations for real-time chat, email and chatbot support to improve customer response times. With effortless communication in any language, you can start boosting your sales and improving your customer satisfaction scores across the globe. Scriptware specializes in support content translations. Feel free to contact us if you’re looking for a language partner to achieve your goals.