5 Effective Tips to Improve Multilingual Customer Support Services

February 11, 2021

5 Effective Tips to Improve Multilingual Customer Support Services

Do you have Multilingual Customer Support?

According to a study by The International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) and Lionbridge, 74% of consumers are likely to make a repeat purchase if the after-sales service is offered in their language.

58% of Consumers also said customer support in their native language improved their loyalty to a brand. While 71% said, it increased their satisfaction.

Yet, only 19% of contact centers provide language support for calls.

Keeping in mind the rapid rate of globalization and the rise of e-commerce, it’s inevitable that you will have customers from different parts of the world.

Other impressive statistics from that report include:

• In the United States, 1 of every 9.3 people age five and older speak Spanish at home.
• Other than English, Spanish is the only language expressed by more than 63 percent of the population in any county in the United States.
• Spanish is the most common language spoken at home in 35 counties.

Does Your Contact Center Offer Multilanguage Customer Support?

According to the ICMI study, most contact centers said they did not have multilingual support because they perceived it as complicated.

If omnichannel support is complicated in English, wouldn’t it be more complicated in other languages?

The thinking goes.

However, offering Multilingual customer support is easier than you think.

Thanks to technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence and, voice analytics, contact centers can provide real-time and high-quality multilingual support.

The best part is that these technologies mitigate the cost and challenges of hiring and retaining bilingual call agents.

Bridging The Multilingual Gap In Your Call Center

 

 

Let’s face it; serving your customers is only going to get more complicated.

That’s why we are here to help. Here are a few tips to get started on multilingual customer support.

Do you know the top 3 languages not supported by your agents?

An excellent place to start is by analyzing the languages your customers use.

You can drill down further and ask, for each of your customers’ top 3 languages, what are the satisfaction levels?

NPS? How do these scores compare to the English scores?

More importantly, you need to consider your customers’ journey; what communication channels do they prefer?

What are their commonalities? Answering these questions will help you map out your center’s multilingual support needs.

Set Your Goals

With data at hand, you can now sit down at your team and create goals.

For example, decide whether you want to use multilingual support to improve CSAT, brand loyalty, call deflection, response time, or customer experience.

What Makes Sense for Your Contact Center?

With your data and new goals set, it’s time to work with your business culture, strategy, and budget in mind.

For example, if your call center consistently supports only two languages, would it make more sense to hire an in-house bilingual agent?

The most critical point to remember is that you have options.

How will you measure the results of your actions?

Now that you have a plan for multilingual support, you need to create a business case to help you track your project’s effectiveness and track your goals.

For example, Call criteria equips call center managers with real-time analytics of agent performance.

The data allows managers to check quality scores in real-time and optimize performance for better results.

Quality Monitoring

Although 91% of contact centers with formal multilingual support monitor and measure customer experience quality through CSAT surveys and internal quality monitoring scores, not all contact centers with multilingual customer support are measuring agent-customer interactions, however, contact center managers need to understand the experience non-English speakers are having, regardless of whether you offer multilingual customer support or not.

Where Do I start?

The best practice we’ve seen so far is to offer support for one or two essential languages on one channel.

Then work with an experienced quality assurance team to monitor, measure, and optimize your multilingual support for improved sales, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.

Need some help getting started? Drop us an email; we love hearing from you.