Schadenfreude, vranyo/враньё, kummerspeck, schlimazel, etc., are all examples of words that are difficult to translate into an English counterpart without losing some of their inherent meaning. Now, imagine an emotionally charged customer voicing their frustrations in their second language (English). Even with a trained translator, there are native idiosyncrasies to every language that can confuse a trained professional. More importantly, using professional translators isn’t scalable for any high-growth business with ambitions to break into the international market. Multilingual customer support is a potential instrument to help overcome these misunderstandings.

Breaking through the language barrier 

Multilingual customer support (MCS) is a software product that provides rapid translation support to customer trouble tickets, transcribed speech-to-text content, live chat content, chatbot responses, etc. Given the unique requirements and social dynamics when engaging in customer support, technical challenges have limited the deployment of large-scale translation software products. Technical limitations, like having sufficient bandwidth to handle the volume of tickets support teams regularly experience, providing quick response time so that complaints aren’t left idling in queues, and translation accuracy or reliability as all translators are not equal (nomenclature, pragmatics), are all issues that MCS software helps to alleviate. 

Localization software products entering the customer service industry face daunting technical challenges. Bandwidth is the largest hurdle as AI-driven translation has a voracious computational appetite. With this appetite and the volume of tickets a contact center can experience, bandwidth quickly becomes an issue. In turn, this impacts response time which then affects customer satisfaction. 

Furthermore, all translation instruments aren’t equal, as some are better trained to support English-to-Spanish translations while others are better suited for Indian-to-Japanese translation support. The ideal solution is to have a service that provides omnilingual support or one that can help decide the best-suited translator on your behalf.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Translation support is traditionally very expensive since scaling customer support departments into other countries requires speakers fluent in that market demographic. Hiring external localization services could also be costly since such organizations still have a considerable overhead to maintain. At this point, many businesses begin to find market penetration too expensive since maintaining a presence internationally would include new customer support departments and headcount.

Having multilingual customer support as a product in your organization completely changes the decision-making tree, as it can drastically reduce overhead in headcount and training. Furthermore, support quality can be maintained since your most experienced and knowledgeable domestic support agents are already on hand and can continue providing support. 

Automating translation for all 

A frequently overused term in business is ‘synergy.’ However, in this case, synergy accurately describes how multilingual support synergizes with other customer support software. Depending on the existing tech stack in their customer support ecosystem, other products like customer self-service, chatbots, and customer education can benefit greatly from having their content localized since it expands their potential audience. For example, chatbots can translate their scripted responses for low-level requests. Self-service and customer education portals can also have their less sophisticated content receive multilingual customer support. Thus, expanding the support reach of both your support team and customer service support software can bring value to a business on many levels.

Open minds and changing attitudes 

Not only have translation instruments improved dramatically in the last decade, but popular sentiment in accepting an AI translator as an intermediary between agent and customer has also steadily improved. In a survey performed in 2021, about 69% of people aged 18 to 29 find automatic translations to be very accurate, and about 58% of customers ages 30 to 44 feel the same way. As time progresses, this rate of acceptance will only increase across the world. MCS can help your company better reach these open-minded customers.

Edited by Shanti S Nair