Countdown to Going Global #11: Round it out with multilingual support

With traffic to your site growing and international orders on the rise, support inquiries are bound to spike as well. Tip #11 will help you extend the same fluid multilingual experience to customer support, as you try to answer:

How do I scale support operations to handle multilingual inquiries?

You can offer customer support in a number of different ways, helping customers over the phone or through onsite chat or email. Which options you offer will depend on how many inquiries you regularly receive and how many resources you have available, both in team time and money. The goal is to ultimately offer support to your customers that fits these criteria:

Fast: customers want answers as quickly as possible and shouldn’t have to wait several days for a response from your team just because they live in a different time zone
Convenient: your support page should be easy to find on all localized versions of your website and it shouldn’t be difficult for customers to submit questions
Helpful: this one seems like common sense, but if you’re using machine translation to respond to customers, or only offer support in one language while your service is available in several, you might as well not offer support internationally

Chat and phone support are challenging to offer on a global scale because you need native speakers to speak with customers live and in multiple languages. With the right team and tools, email can be a great way to provide timely international customer support.

Speed

Our favorite multilingual support method combines machine and human translation, and is used by Gengo customer Eventbrite and our own small support team headquartered in Tokyo.

Eventbrite’s team aims for a tight support ticket turnaround time of just 24 hours, so they need an efficient solution to process all inbound help tickets, no matter which language they’re in. Across time zones and languages, the team responds to tickets in languages that their staff doesn’t speak by translating inbound tickets via machine translation and using crowdsourced translation to craft a quality, comprehensive, polite response.

At Gengo, we want to provide the best support possible, but also have a small team that helps customers in languages that we don’t speak in-house. As a result, we assembled a support team that splits working periods to cover 24 full hours, not just Japan or California time, and respond to tickets in less than an hour. We have agents who are native speakers for English, Japanese and Spanish and provide email support for all other languages with the crowd. The results speak for themselves!

Self-serve

Before you configure your support system to handle multilingual tickets, one of the first (and easiest) things to do is to translate self-help materials, like FAQ sections and support forums. Helping customers find information on their own saves you time and money, and gives them immediate answers.

At first, offering support in multiple languages can seem like yet another barrier to going global, but it doesn’t have to be. Teams small and large can benefit from using the right tools.

Read all of the tips in Gengo’s Going Global Countdown:

Go global with Gengo’s people-powered translation platform.

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