The World Wide Web isn’t as global as it sounds. And, as the demand for localization grows, a lot of brands are missing out on target groups.
Why?
Because they only cater to English speakers.
We get it. It’s easy to rely on English. After all, we are a Dutch company talking to you in English. But the world is big and full of talented, inquisitive people who communicate in other languages. Many of them might be your customers — if they could understand what you have to say.
As specialists in multilingual customer support, we’ve seen the power of a global workforce.
We’d like you to see it, too.
Is it hard to hire multilingual customer support?
Plenty of brands want to increase their multilingual hires but just haven’t got around to it yet. This could be for any number of reasons: from not knowing where to find the talent, to not having the time to recruit or onboard. But, difficult as it seems, the potential benefits are hard to ignore.
You just need to know where to look.
Benefits of multilingual customer support
Whether you’re a world-renowned brand or a startup, there are a lot of upsides to going multilingual, such as:
People trust their native tongue
Remember how your mom told you to learn other languages for traveling? She wasn’t wrong. It’s well documented that people trust their own language more than any other.
English included.
People find having to speak another language stressful. The last thing anyone needs, when frustrated, is to search for those awkward foreign words. According to Rosetta Stone, saying just a few words in a customer’s language helps to build the relationship.
Add the 76% of online shoppers who prefer buying products in their native language, and the 40% who don’t buy from foreign language sites — and you’re looking at a lot of lost business.
Unsurprisingly, these factors also apply to customer support.
People are loyal to brands that speak their language
Loyalty doesn’t automatically manifest: you have to earn it. And, hard as it is to build trust, speaking someone’s language is a great first step toward customer satisfaction.
According to Intercom, 70% of users feel greater loyalty toward brands that provide support in their native language. And 29% of businesses say they’ve lost customers because they don’t provide multilingual support.
With that in mind, neglecting multilingual customer support can damage customer-brand relationships. And if your customers aren’t yours, they’re someone else’s…
Many companies still aren’t clued in
While multilingual service is common in government, law, and healthcare, it’s neglected in sales industries. If an American law firm can pick up the phone and speak French, we all can.
Although 88% of support teams claim to offer multilingual support, only 28% of end-users actually see it. Furthermore, an ICMI report shows that, while 86% of companies report having non-native customers, only 65.5% of customers say they offer multilingual support.
These numbers are improving, but there’s still a wide gap to bridge. Pretty soon, more and more brands will get on board. When that happens, the competitive advantage gleaned from offering multilingual support will decrease. It’ll simply become the norm for any globally-minded business.
Local support is global support. Isn’t it time you used it?
Local and global are often the same thing because having that global support system just means being local in more places than one.
If you use native speakers, you’re using people who can pick up on humor and nuances non-native speakers will likely miss. You get protection from that connection between your support staff and customers.
There’s a ‘but’ to all this, though: finding talented multilingual support agents isn’t just time-consuming, it’s also hard.
You might not know where to go to source the right people, or perhaps you lack the resources to train and support your new team (after all, even support staff need to feel supported). And, if you get it wrong, you might waste a lot of time on the wrong solution.
That’s where we come in.
We save you time by doing the legwork
We take the hassle out of creating a multilingual customer support team.
Our platform is a quick and easy way to select talented multilingual support staff, all of them carefully vetted, so you know you’re getting the best.
