Three Things to Avoid When Going Global with Chat Services
By Marcus Casal, Director of Product Management, Lionbridge
A recent story in The Economist noted that less than 20 percent of the world’s population speaks English as a primary or secondary language. That means that any business that communicates exclusively in English is forsaking 80 percent of its potential customer base unless they can communicate -- and engage deeply -- with their customers and prospects in multiple languages.
Those numbers are staggering and given the intense competition for new customers -- particularly in “mature” geographic markets -- what executive in their right mind would ignore such a large and essentially untapped opportunity? The hurdle, as we all know, lies in our internet-powered global economic structure in which these opportunities are often in places where English is not the native language or even widely spoken.
New Technology Paves the Way
Today, forward-thinking businesses in just about every industry are deploying new technologies to help them interact with more customers, in more languages, in a more engaging way. After all, consumers expect the companies they buy products and services from to be responsive 24x7. They also increasingly demand a better experience through deeper and more meaningful engagement via the channel that is most convenient to them. And all in their own native language!
Which tools are emerging as the most popular and most successful to enable this engagement? In many industries live chat solutions are leading the charge by providing one-to-one customer interactions that reduce support costs, increase revenue and improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) metrics.
Live Chat Pitfalls
When thinking about going global with chat, here are three things to AVOID:
1) Only hiring native language agents to support your customers
In one case, a high tech manufacturing customer estimated it would need more than 400 language specific agents to support its complex products. Ultimately budget was only allocated for 40. Even with budget availability, hiring language-specific agents with the right technical skills has shown to be almost impossible.
2) Only providing ‘office hours’ coverage for most languages
Helping customers some of the time is better than not at all, right? A UK-based online gaming company thought so, and provided support from 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. in all European/Middle Eastern/African (EMEA) languages only to find that their most lucrative customers wanted assistance after hours. Monitoring and understanding international visitor traffic to the company website can help avoid this mistake, but still leaves a lot to be desired for the customer who wants help when it’s convenient for them, not for you.
3) Relying on Google Translate
Most organizations are understandably reluctant to trust important customer communications to the translation quality of free products like Google Translate, and rightfully so. For example, a large manufacturer of recreational products incorporated a Google Translate button into their chat but found no one used it. Google Translate is great if you just want to give someone the very basics of intended communication. However, as a representation of a company’s brand and customer service platform, it should not be the first choice.
Companies Who Do it Right
LivePerson, a leading provider of intelligent engagement solutions, selected GeoFluent, real-time translation solution from Lionbridge, to assist with their global expansion strategy. The solution is high quality, actionable machine translations that enables LivePerson chat agents to support their customers in any language 24x7.
From a customer support perspective, LivePerson saw a 15% increase in call deflection and 5% increase in CSAT among non-English speakers after integrating multilingual chat. From an online sales perspective, businesses using the real-time translation solution have reported an 11% increase in online conversions and 16% productivity increase for call center agents.
Online gaming leader PKR took a similar approach with multilingual chat and since its implementation has managed over 28,000 multilingual sessions with just 16 chats agents. You can read the full case study here.
The Ocean of Opportunity
The continued adoption of real-time tools for multilingual communication is radically improving the quality, frequency and ease of customer communication. While still in the early stages, the proliferation of new channels for customer interaction allows companies to cost-effectively meet the ever-changing needs of customers worldwide to help reduce costs, increase satisfaction and shatter the language barrier to new revenue-generation opportunities.
For most multinational companies, going global with chat requires a solid international communications strategy and framework for success. Learn more about multilingual chat at www.GeoFluent.com or request a live demo.