This is the second post in a two-part series. Read the first part here.

For ecommerce companies, the holidays call for extra care with shipping and logistics. Global companies like Amazon, Alibaba and Rakuten are already expanding seasonal staff and preparing for an avalanche of holiday orders through their platforms and marketplaces—UPS alone plans to hire upwards of 90,000 workers to make end-of-year deliveries as smooth as possible.

To your customer, what matters most after clicking “order” is communication—updates on delays and deliveries, clear shipping expectations and the ability to communicate with customer support at any time of day, in his or her own language. Because of this, translating support content and social media, two often overlooked types of dynamic content, is a critical part of the holiday ecommerce puzzle.

Order of operations

Before you tackle support and social content translation, you should make sure that your site is fully localized, from your marketing messaging down to the smallest strings. Here’s a quick checklist for ecommerce sites, outlined more in depth here:

• Static content like website localization, transactional messages, terms of service
• Product descriptions, of which there can be hundreds of thousands
• Marketing and promotions, including landing pages, social, email and content marketing (i.e. blogs, user reviews, articles, guides and comments)
• Support communication, documentation, forums

Most of this content should be translated long before the holiday rush, but some may by necessity come later, like new support forum threads, emergency social messages and the like. If anything is missing, it’s a good idea to catch and patch translation holes as soon as possible to keep customers engaged and comfortable on your site—if you don’t have a great shopping experience, another site will.

Lend a helping hand

No matter how sophisticated your shipping processes and seamless your transactions, something will go wrong. Bumps are natural, but you must be equipped to handle them in your communication with customers. As you ramp up your logistics and fulfillment and lock down your website and promotions, don’t skimp on customer support.

The good news? You don’t need to scale your team like you need to scale your logistics team—even small teams can offer dynamic support across all target languages with the right translation technology. The most cost-effective, efficient method that we recommend for scaling multilingual customer support, whether permanently or seasonally, is using machine translation for simple incoming messages (to read what customers ask) and a human translator and/or native speaker for outgoing responses to users (to write replies). Complex incoming messages may require human translation as well.

Don’t forget about support documentation and FAQs. Offer customers an opportunity to find answers to their questions before reaching out—translating knowledgebases is a great way to increase satisfaction and cut costs and time spent on inquiries by the support team. And, if you produce your own products and accompanying how-to manuals, don’t forget to translate these guides. Nobody wants to spend holiday time wading through foreign-language instruction booklets.

Recommendation

If you work with Zendesk, we recommend using the Gengo plugin for reading and responding to customer inquiries. If not, we suggest our machine/crowd translation cocktail—using traditional methods for support translation is too expensive (and slow), and you definitely don’t want to leave sensitive details in customer responses to machine translation.

Chit chat

Of course, not all customers ask for support through email or support forms. Social channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and international networks are full of customer inquiries, everything from the simple “Do you ship to Canada?” to the more complex.

Outside of the usual community engagement and content promotion—which is better to plan in advance—you may want to send alerts out to users en masse when the unpredictable happens, like bad weather that derails delivery or other unexpected service outages.

Recommendation

Another great partner in the Gengo ecosystem, Fliplingo, helps teams sync and manage all social content on one platform. It works with Buffer, Instagram, Sina Weibo, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. With your team working in overdrive, automating steps can make all the difference. Translating copy manually works as well—the important thing is to keep social media on your radar.

Learn more about how you can use Gengo for ecommerce.

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