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Successfully Engage with Multilingual Customers through Chat

by Marcus Casal, Director, Product Management, Lionbridge - May 1, 2013

Successfully Engage with Multilingual Customers through Chat
 By Marcus Casal, Director, Product Management, Lionbridge

Less than 20 percent of the world’s population speaks English as a primary or secondary language. This means any business which communicates exclusively in English is forsaking 80 percent of its potential customer base unless it can communicate quickly and accurately - and therefore, engage deeply - with customers and prospects in multiple languages.

Add the customer’s increasing expectation that companies must be responsive at all hours of the day, every day, through a highly reliable channel which is convenient and available to them and customer service and support becomes a monumental priority.

New technology paves the way

As with most service-driven industries, the contact centers which service just about every segment and market are leveraging new technologies to help meet this growing demand. An increasingly common and highly effective customer service and support strategy features the implementation of live chat solutions which provide one-to-one customer interactions that reduce support costs, increase revenue and improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) metrics.

Further adding to the allure of chat is that many customers prefer it. This past holiday season, LivePerson, which offers a platform that enables businesses to proactively connect in real-time with their customers via chat, voice, and content delivery, engaged with customers in more than 860,000 chats on Cyber Monday alone. This represented a 30 percent increase over the previous year. In a 2012 survey, LivePerson found that 94 percent of holiday shoppers who had used live chat in the past planned on using it again during the Christmas 2012 holiday season.

Live chat pitfalls
Based on our experience in working with many organizations which have initially struggled to bring live chat solutions to non-English speaking customers, we’ve identified three common mistakes to help contact center managers and customer experience directors avoid the same pitfalls.

1) Only hiring native language agents to support your customers
In one case, a high tech manufacturer estimated it would need more than 400 language specific agents to support its complex products. Ultimately, budget was only allocated for 40. Even if the budget is available, 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.

How to Go Global…Successfully
Avoiding these initial pitfalls of live chat are imperative for any customer service network, and in many cases there are technology partners that can streamline the implementation and ongoing management required for such a technology roll out.

To meet these demands head on, LivePerson recently adopted Lionbridge’s GeoFluent, a real-time translation solution, to assist with its global expansion strategy. GeoFluent’s high quality, actionable machine translations enable LivePerson agents to support their customers in any language 24/7. This integration created a significantly improved customer experience.

From a customer support perspective, LivePerson saw a 15 percent increase in call deflection and five percent increase in CSAT among non-English speakers with GeoFluent compared to results where multilingual chat was not previously available. From an online sales perspective, businesses using GeoFluent have reported an 11 percent increase in online conversions and 16 percent productivity increase for contact center agents compared to results prior to multilingual chat availability.

The continued adoption of real-time tools for multilingual communication is radically improving the quality, frequency, and ease of customer communication in the contact center. 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 their customers worldwide to help reduce costs, increase satisfaction, and shatter the language barrier to offer improved customer service and new revenue-generation opportunities.

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About the Author
Marcus Casal is Director of Product Management at Lionbridge. Marcus is responsible for GeoFluent, Lionbridge’s real-time translation offering that is transforming multilingual customer support and community engagement. Marcus’ career spans 14 years in the language technology and localization industries, ranging from localization consulting, production engineering, solutions development and operational management. Marcus holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in in language-related fields.

 
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