Unlocking Global Growth with Multilingual Customer Service
There is a tough and risky journey to navigate as you try to grow a business internationally, and there’s a good reason many people don’t have even the courage to try – let alone the skills to succeed. Every day, we talk to and work with businesses who want to grow outside of their domestic market and they have a huge range of worries and concerns. There’s risk involved, and speculation, but that’s not unique to international growth.
Once your up-front translation costs are out of the way, every smaller business has the same fundamental concern: how can you continue giving good customer service and retain control of communication in multiple languages? This basically boils down to how you’ll keep things going long term. It’s one thing to translate a whole load of content. It’s another to provide powerful growth support, exactly as and when it’s needed, without a budget bursting at the seams. It needs a translation company with a specialised approach.
Email-Client Integrated Assistance
Why it matters
Businesses can’t survive if they don’t communicate. Answering questions and responding to feedback and comments are essential. But quality matters here – it’s not a job you can just sub-contract out or give away if you want to do it well. Managing this in a foreign language means acting fast, being agile but also staying involved and keeping a hand on the rudder to be sure you’re staying on-message and showing your brand in the right light. Doing this right is an essential minimum requirement for keeping up with the locals in any market.
What it can give you
Delegating access to your email accounts to your agency can help you deal with client complaints or enquiries that need urgent responses. Instead of the usual back and forth emailing from client to supplier to agency, you can work with your translation provider to craft responses a few easy steps. To find out more, read our blog on multilingual complaint management.
Social Media
Why it matters
Omni-channel communication is not just a buzzword; it represents the future of business communications. Consumers will call you, they will email you and write to you, but they will also write both to you and about you on social networks. They will expect you to have a presence and be sharing your messages across different platforms persistently. You can survive without it, perhaps, but if you really want to look credible among the locals, you have to keep up.
What it can give you
Social media may be one of the most powerful marketing and communication tools we have available, and every brand is expected to communicate through social platforms nowadays. Translating your social media feeds and updates in a way that’s right for your brand, focusing on your message and helping you achieve your social objectives while remaining 100% human is no small feat. These need to be done fast to keep you moving. Much like delegating access to emails, delegating access to social media managers like Buffer or Hootsuite are an easy way that your agency can help you manage multilingual feeds.
Telephone support
Why it matters
Call centres may have lost their prevalence slightly in the age of email, online chat and social media, but they’re still the preferred point of contact for many – particular in the event of a complaint or a difficult urgent situation needing resolution. If you’re marketing in a language, you’ve simply got to be able to respond to phone calls in that language.
What it can give you
If your translation provider offers telephone interpreting, their linguists can join 3 way conversations to be at hand to help at the drop of a hat. The best interpreting services offer 24 hours a day assistance with rapid access, allowing you to connect with your clients, wherever they are. Our own telephone interpreting service, Integro On Call, has an average connection of 28 seconds for the last 12 months, across every language we offer. Any provider should be willing to tell you how they compare with that.
The aim with these is to give your business what you actually need to grow: access to quality, fast and responsive services that won’t cost a fortune. The right language service support should give you the confidence to grow unencumbered, not hold you back.
If you’d like to know more about any of the services mentioned in this blog, please get in touch with Integro for a chat.