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The world is multilingual, and a lot of businesses understand that the Internet has opened up a world of new customers. When a customer lands on your website but isn’t fluent in English, they’ll navigate to their own language when available.
When the potential client calls, they often won’t struggle to convey their needs in a language they’re not fluent in.
In terms of satisfaction, offering everything in a customer’s language will improve customer satisfaction. Studies and reports show that:
- 71.5% of customer service leaders claim that support in a native’s own language increases satisfaction.
- 74% of customers are more likely to repurchase or use services again when after-sales care is available in their own language.
Poor customer service causes companies to lose $62 billion annually. Multilingual support would be able to correct some of these issues.
Businesses that have subsidiaries overseas can often apply for an L1 Visa to bring talent from overseas to a location in the United States.Customer service agents, trained in support for Spanish, for example, may be able to be brought over on a visa to help boost the customer’s experience if they speak Spanish.
Hiring offshore workers can also help.
A lot of outsourcing companies, especially for customer service, will have a multilingual staff that is ready to answer customer calls in a variety of languages. This is just one form of support for customers that can help enhance the customer experience.
What other ways can businesses market to different cultures while meeting their multilingual needs?
- Tailor marketing material to the demographic. This can be everything from flyers to online advertisements that are written in a native language and geared toward their cultural differences.
- Training staff and researching culture-specific information to help management and customer service offer a better experience for customers. It’s important that everything from a greeting to marketing material respect cultural differences, including any language used.
- Incorporate a diverse workforce with employees from a variety of different backgrounds. When this is done, it provides a diverse environment that a potential client can enter and not feel intimidated in.
- Offer multilingual websites. When a large portion of your target demographic speaks a different language, it’s important to provide as much content in the customer’s language as possible. This can be a different portion of your website, or it can be a translation service, such as Google Translate, which will automatically translate your text into another language.
Companies can also offer social media and online support in another language. The potential is two-fold: customers may be more satisfied, and it’s also possible that you’ll be able to reach more customers by offering multilingual options.
Customers would rather conduct business in their own language. When it’s not offered, it makes the entire transaction more difficult, from the purchase to customer service.
Meeting the needs of customers from different cultures and who speak different languages is possible with a few additions to a business’ customer support approach and team. As a business grows, the need to implement multilingual options into the business will also grow.
