Multilingual customer support tips

Tips for multilingual call center

The markets are becoming more diverse with each passing day. Thus, it has become unavoidable for businesses to cross the language barriers and communicate. Having the right people speak in your prospect’s language has seamless benefits. They trust you more and involuntarily get emotionally attached to your company or brand. Hence, investing in multilingual customer support is wise, as it is sure to bring you enormous results.

However, it is imperative to be acquainted with certain tips to get the most out of multilingual customer support services. A few prominent ones among them are explained below.

  1. Identify the support level needed

    Gauge the customer knowledge and provide him support only based on that. Analyse the scope before you start providing solutions. Else you will not just be wasting the valuable time but also irritating the caller. This is one of the most valuable tips when you have limited resources to handle the calls.

  2. Implement customer service strategies that are cross-cultural

    Most of the times, cultural aspects are not considered at all when customer service is employed. This is in fact a sin to do so. Overlooking this can lead to disasters, especially when you initiate upselling or cross selling. In certain countries it may be impolite to try cross-selling even after a successful and quality customer support. Response time expectations for email queries also vary based on geographical locations.

    So, it is important to scrutinize the local cultural preferences of the language in which you are providing multilingual call center support.

  3. Tell customers about the availability of multilingual support

    Managing customer expectations is crucial to succeed in providing customer support. People won’t expect that support from your end is available across all hours, languages and channels. However, for avoiding unwanted dissatisfaction and frustration, communicate what you are offering and what you are not. When you associate with a professional company offering global multilingual services, discuss in regard of this in detail with them.

  4. Multiple channel support

    Customer support should be offered via all available communication channels. For making sure of omnichannel experience for customers,  it is imperative to avail multilingual customer service through all possible channels simultaneously. Expectations of customers in regard of support is skyhigh nowadays and they are pleased only when support is provided all time round the clock. This means, for getting a response to their query intimated on your Facebook page, they are not going to wait forever. You can create multiple pages on social networking websites. Likewise, your website should also offer live chat support in multiple languages. For higher level of customer satisfaction, multilingual chat support services can be of great help.

  5. Hire the right people

    It is obvious that you should conduct written as well as oral tests for hiring individuals but it is also very important to get people who fit aptly to the cultural mandates. You have to avail assistance to people who don’t just speak different languages but also have varied cultural orientations. So, meeting their expectations is not that easy. Every agent must be trained for cross cultural interaction and topics like ethnic etiquette, tone and vocabulary should be covered. As phone calls are high-touch and real-time in nature, it is of grave significance. If you don’t specialize in the said things, outsourcing to an expert call center vendor would be the right thing to do.

  6. Use Chatbot Properly

    If you are using a chatbot apart from an online content repository, ensure that you are using a technology that is useful in dealing with multilingual customers. Check with a vendor to find out if it can provide you with natural language processing support. You may choose to use your content management system to run automated chatbot responses for every language that you select. This is a crucial step if you are looking to expand globally. This can impact users to a large extent.

  7. Exercise tight control over terminology

    You should strongly focus on terminology control especially if your customer service and product are digital. However, it is commonly found that different product support pages feature different terms in translated forms compared to the actual words that are found in product interfaces. For example, if ‘Submit’ means ‘Enviar’ in the Spanish edition of the product interface, you will surely not ask users to ‘Click Mandar’ in the online sheet. One way to handle this is to maintain a glossary or term base of your key phrases. The time you invest in creating these resources would pay you back in terms of accuracy and professionalism.

  8. Strategize Your Phone Support Area

    If you are delivering customer support via various modes such as chatbot and help desk in another language, you should also opt for multilingual phone assistance. If you have the budget to invest in infrastructure and resources to use phone support, you should actually go ahead. If you cannot afford phone support, you should mention it clearly on your website. You may need to change web design a bit to prevent yourself from delivering a ‘Call us now’’ message to your customers.

Armed with the above simple tips for multilingual customer support, you can surely offer enhanced support to your valuable customers. These tips will not just make your services more effective, but also help you retain existing clientele.

If you are in quest of quality multilingual support services, get in touch with WinBizSolutionsIndia today itself. The company is a reliable hub where customers from across the world reach for productive call center services.