Effective customer support is vital for long-term business growth. When building a strategy, multilingual support should be at the forefront of even the smallest companies’ minds. With a global digital society, this provides access to new markets and can increase revenue. But what are the best ways to approach it?
Why Isn’t English Enough?
English is now a global business language spoken in 58 countries, with many others using it alongside local tongues.
Around 1.52 billion people worldwide now use English. However, only 17% of the globe speaks it natively, with others using it in varying degrees. This means you are excluding the other 83% from accessing your products or services.
The online betting and casino sector in the GCC is a perfect example of a business that needs multilingual support to thrive. Spread across multiple jurisdictions, these providers of online casino games put regional accessibility at the forefront of their website design.
People can use the site for playing games like blackjack or simply checking on their withdrawals by clicking an option to change languages. This can be done without any glitches or bugs in the website design.
The Benefits of Multilingual Support
Statistics have shown that around 29% of businesses lose customers due to a lack of multilingual support. Retaining these customers is a huge chunk of profit, so it has the ability to increase revenue.
A further 71% of customers show loyalty to brands with multilingual support, bringing people back time and time again. This loyalty is the foundation for a long-lasting business.
Your brand reach also expands. If you only market to English speakers and deal with them, then you will only get customers from those countries.
With different languages, you open up a whole new customer base. With this enhanced customer service experience, providing long-term retention in multiple countries, you are set to outperform competitors and grow quickly.
Considerations for Multilingual Support
By no means do you have to support every major global language. Check your web traffic and see where most of your customers are coming from.
If you can manage to add the first languages used in these countries, you should start to see more retention on your website and even reduced bounce rates. You may also want to add languages from countries that you are interested in attracting customers from.
Choosing the right channels is also vital. For example, don’t bother having Chinese customer service on WhatsApp, because most of that market uses WeChat. Certain markets will also prefer different types of customer service, with some shunning live chat and instead opting for email-based answers.
Don’t just rely on machine translation either. This can be incorrect and often does not have the tone or correct phrasing. Make sure you get someone proficient in the language to check it over for you.
Doing this will also give you a better understanding of how to approach different customers when they do contact you, further fostering loyalty and setting you up as a successful long-term global business.
