Make customer service the key to the international market

Have you ever wondered if customer service serves a greater purpose in your business beyond assisting customers? You are not alone; many people want to understand the true value behind customer support. Support teams now collaborate more closely with businesses to drive growth by delivering value to customers and encouraging them to stay loyal.

If you want to start paving the way for customer support to become one of, if not the top, growth drivers, then you need to offer valuable features. Among those features are: 24/7 support, empathy in every interaction, automation in some cases, and multilingual support, the one that brings us together today.

Let’s understand why offering a multilingual customer experience is a great competitive advantage for your business. Let’s get into the meaning, pros, cons, channels to offer it, and how to implement it.

What is multilingual customer support 

Multilingual customer support allows businesses to assist their customers in their native language, through several channels like chat, phone, email, sms, etc. This breaks down barriers and enables international expansion by going beyond basic translation to include cultural nuances that ensure people feel valued by the support team.

In practical terms, what is multilingual support? This can be defined as the business's ability to offer consistent customer service in multiple languages across the entire support journey. It involves bilingual or multilingual agents, AI-powered translation tools, multilingual chatbots, or a hybrid model combining technology with human expertise.

Today’s multilingual support is omnichannel by default, the reason being that companies want to satisfy their customers by covering their needs. People expect to receive experiences on different channels, while expecting other options like self-service in their own language. When businesses care for their customers, they will value the efforts and stay loyal.

But what are their real needs? Reports say that 70% of global consumers expect a complete customer experience in their native language, and nearly the same percentage are willing to switch brands if that expectation is not met. Over 75% of customers want post-sale support in their native language, and 74% are more likely to repurchase from businesses that provide it. Multilingual customer support directly influences trust and long-term revenue, becoming a measurable factor.

Advantages and challenges of multilingual support

Benefits of multilingual customer support 

We have defined what multilingual customer service is and navigated customer needs associated with multilingual support. Now, let’s talk about some benefits that come from offering multilingual customer support services. Before you decide to offer it, you must know how it will actually enhance your business. These are some of the most common benefits:

Multilingual support benefits and challenges

1. Expands your customer support reach

If you feel like your reach to other countries is limited, multilingual support just might be what you’ve been looking for. Instead of adding friction to the experience, you're solving a big issue that’s keeping your business from expanding. 76% of consumers across 29 countries prefer to buy products with information in their own language, opening a great gap that you can cover by simply adding a feature to your current support team.

2. Enhances the customer experience

A multilingual customer experience makes people feel accepted and a part of a community. Creating that feeling is more important than you think. 35% of customers would switch products for brands that offer support in their native language. Potential customers will want to buy from you if they are able to communicate with you in their native language. 

3. Offers a competitive advantage

Not every brand offers this multilingual strategy, so it opens up a competitive gap that you can take advantage of. When customers face products and services with similar prices, there gotta be something that makes them stand out, sometimes a customer support feature can make the difference. How is this possible? You are investing in creating valuable experiences that show them you care.

4. Improves businesses’ ROI

Multilingual support drives retention and lifetime value. A 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by 25% to 95%. Since 80% of customers may switch brands due to poor service, language support becomes a revenue-protecting investment.

5. Provides better insights 

When offering multilingual customer support, you’ll receive insights from people with different backgrounds and cultures, opening an opportunity to understand your international clients. These insights help teams refine product roadmaps and market strategies with real customer input.

Challenges of multilingual customer support 

You learned about the benefits of outsourcing multilingual customer support, but we hate to break it to you, but not everything is good. You will inevitably face some challenges while trying to offer a multilingual customer support service, but we have great news for you! Once you know some of them, you will know how to avoid or overcome them. These are some challenges you can face: 

1. Ensuring support stays consistent and coherent 

Having a coherent tone and accurate messaging across several languages requires clear guidelines. Why is this important? You need to make sure your agents understand aspects beyond language, and culture plays an important role. They don’t need to talk in their language; they must be able to speak through cultural nuances, if not, translations will feel robotic and might lead to misunderstandings.

2. Needs constant training

Every customer support strategy needs training to survive time, language especially needs it to understand how culture evolves. Cultural knowledge is relevant to ensure the agents know exactly how to interact with the customers respectfully. While training can be a challenge, you need to make sure it is valuable to agents, and the way to measure its success is by analyzing customer satisfaction.

3. Hard to find the right talent for specific needs

Even though BPO companies offer access to a global talent pool, this doesn’t mean hiring the right candidate is easy. Especially when hiring for multilingual support, the ideal candidate needs to have extra skills that will enhance the customer experience. Just knowing the language is not enough, and companies need to make sure their teams consist of highly-skilled individuals.

4. Some languages require a higher investment

Some languages require higher investment due to lower ticket volumes or complex localization needs. This makes prioritization essential to avoid overspending. Other languages might be too complex to understand at the beginning, making it difficult to launch them fast, leading to delayed structures.

5. Volume volatility 

Time zones and regional demand patterns create staffing challenges. Peaks can shift quickly, making scheduling and capacity planning more complex for multi language customer service teams.

Channels to provide multilingual customer service

1. Email

Email is a reliable channel for multilingual customer service, as it supports translation tools and templates while allowing agents time to craft accurate, culturally appropriate responses. Email is great for cases where both agents and customers need to explain themselves in detail, allowing them to write as much as needed, and also for cases where time is not critical.

2. Phone

Phone support relies heavily on native-speaking agents or real-time translation solutions. For this channel, agents need to be well-versed in the customer's language as their tone and accent play a critical role in quality. Phone is especially important for urgent or emotionally driven interactions, making it the preferred channel for multilingual support.

3. Live chat

Live chat combines speed with scalability. AI chatbots can handle common questions in multiple languages, while complex cases are routed to human agents. The hybrid approach works well for cases where instant solutions are needed. For this channel, agents must properly know grammar to avoid mistakes that can lead to misunderstandings.

4. Social Media

Social platforms often become public support channels. Language-specific profiles or controlled auto-translation help brands engage global audiences while protecting brand voice and accuracy. Social media allows for expanding into international markets, so it makes sense to add multilingual support.

5. In-app

In-app multilingual customer support integrates chat, guides, and knowledge bases directly into the product. This creates a seamless experience and reduces friction during key moments in the user journey.

Best practices for multilingual customer support

Like any other strategy, multilingual support needs careful integration, features to ensure smooth experiences, and tips to make it successful. So, let’s discuss some of the best practices that will take your multilingual customer experience to the next level:

1. Use AI and technology to support multilingual agents. Some tools assist your agents, making them more efficient by saving time on real-time translation, offering multilingual chatbots, and routing cases automatically. The key is to have human agents supervise what technology does so it stays compliant and consistent.

2. Offer a multilingual knowledge base. Some customers prefer to assist themselves instead of reaching out to support. If you want to satisfy international customers, then adding FAQs, tutorials, help articles, and videos in different languages that align with your market is the best choice. 

3. Build a multilingual culture. Implementing multilingual customer support starts by changing the mindset of your business. This means you must adopt a multilingual culture. What do we mean by this? Start adopting inclusive experiences across every touchpoint for both customers and employees.

4. Analyze your customers’ communication trends. The best way to ensure success is to analyze language preferences, peak contact times, and sentiment. This way, you know where you have to allocate your resources, making it an effective strategy for multilingual support.

5. Hire native agents. Hiring native agents is one of the best ways to ensure smooth experiences. Don’t get us wrong, though, you may have near native agents and still succeed, but training becomes very important. This approach may increase your needed investment to make sure agents understand the cultural aspects of language that only native people would.

6. Evaluate performance and apply changes. Since this is part of customer service, you can start measuring general support metrics like customer satisfaction, resolution times, and escalation rates. Eventually, you must start tracking multilingual-specific metrics like linguistic friction, escalation rate to native speakers (per language), or cultural sensitivity score.

7. Build consistent guidelines that prevent misunderstandings. Customer feedback plays a vital role in this, and training ensures the needed refinement is performed. You will be able to create specific guidelines once you better understand the rules around tone and culture to create policies that enhance the experience.

8. Perform QA audits. Not only is measuring enough, but you need to make sure the quality stays consistent for every interaction. If not, customers will become frustrated, and your strategy will become useless. Make sure to collect and analyze feedback provided by employees and customers and act on it to improve the experience.

How to implement multilingual customer support services into your operations

Understand your customer’s needs

The first thing you must do for a successful integration is to understand what your customers need. You can perform market research to understand the culture behind the market, and you can use customer interactions to read between the lines and get valuable insights about their expectations. Based on the discoveries, you can start creating your goals so you can proceed.

Decide whether to hire in-house or outsource

The next step after you have defined your goals is to make a business decision on whether to hire an outsourced team or go for an in-house approach. In-house teams require more investment, but in return, your company has control over the entire strategy and execution.

Outsourcing multilingual customer support services can accelerate coverage and reduce hiring risk, especially when testing new markets. The benefits of outsourcing multilingual customer support include faster scaling, access to native talent, and predictable costs. Some companies might step aside from outsourcing as you sacrifice full control. 

Hire your team and assist them with AI & technology

Once you have decided on your go-to strategy, it is time for your company to start the hiring process. Make sure your candidates have the necessary skills for your needs and are a cultural fit for your business. For technology, you must look for tools that enhance your agent’s experience. These tools include: Neural machine translation, chatbots, and agent-assist tools, which provide scalable coverage while maintaining efficiency.

Train your team

Start developing a clear training strategy with your Learning & Development team that includes topics around: the company’s culture, support trends, language nuances, and customer needs. These topics must be reinforced at onboarding, and you need to create new training strategies every once in a while, so your team stays up-to-date.

Onboard them

Once your training strategy is ready, you can start onboarding your team and provide them with all the necessary information and resources they need to start doing their job. A great onboarding paves the way for great results in launching the team.

Launch the team

After preparing your team, you can now start thinking about launching your multilingual support strategy. But work is not done after you have launched your team; it has merely just begun. The real work starts now.

Measure performance and apply changes

Measuring metrics and collecting customer feedback is the real job behind multilingual support, as this is what keeps your support team pushing forward and improving. Customers love it when they feel valued by companies, and one of the best ways to show them you care is by improving based on their feedback.

Continue measuring 

Measuring is a non-stop job; if you really want to succeed and improve the satisfaction level beyond and stay ahead of the game, then feedback and data become your greatest allies. Keep doing it and show your customers that their feedback drives your strategies.

Start your multilingual journey now

If you are trying to expand to new markets, then multilingual support is a must for your business. Start the journey by deciding what the main customer needs are and how to solve them through a multilingual investment. 

After that, you must decide on your operation model, whether you go for an outsourced team or an in-house one. Start thinking about training and onboarding by preparing a clear strategy that ensures your team will be ready to launch!

At Horatio, we know the importance of customer support, and we want businesses to discover how their entire CX team can become their top growth drivers. Contact us, and we will create a tailored strategy that fits your business goals while staying true to your culture.