Join the Movement, Grab Our Unique Offer and Support Ukraine Today!
Table of Contents
One of the most significant challenges companies face is how to scale internationally. A critical component of that expansion is having multilingual support. Although English is the most popular language online, it only represents 25% of the world's internet users. If companies want to expand to new countries, they must support multiple languages.
In this post, we break down the benefits of multilingual support and how you can use it to scale your business.
The Trend Towards Globalization
The world is getting "smaller" and more connected as brands expand globally. We saw an increase of 16.8% in worldwide commerce sales in 2021, and that number will only go up. Latin America saw a rise of 25% in e-commerce sales, India's e-commerce market is on track to double by 2025, and Russia, the UK, and the Philippines saw a growth of 20%. Increased globalization brings communication challenges and requires brands to communicate with their international customers in their native language.
The Benefits of Multilingual Customer Support
Here are some benefits that multilingual customer support brings to brands that want to expand to new regions.
Improves Customer Communication
Customers want to communicate in their native language. Seventy-four percent (74%) of customers are more willing to buy from a brand that can support them in their native language after the sale. Using Google Translate or hiring a translator to translate your FAQ pages to other languages is not enough. You must have a customer support team that speaks the language fluently and has a deep knowledge of all the cultural nuances, references, and slang of each region where you want to expand.
Supports Product Enhancements
When you offer support in different languages, you get more customer feedback, which ultimately helps you to improve your product or service. The more access you have to that data, the better you can serve your customers, which provides a powerful loop of product enhancement and growth.
In many companies, the customers influence the development of new features and the trajectory of the product map. It's vital to keep the pulse on the customer's evolving needs and achieve the optimal product-market fit to solve them. Multilingual support sets the foundation to be able to get that feedback from the customer.
Drives Expanded Geographic Reach
Multilingual support opens the door for B2B and B2C companies to sell in new regions. For instance, B2B companies with tech products with many features often need to provide detailed support in multiple languages to international customers. Not only would they need to create help docs and instructional videos in different languages, but they would also need to provide tech support in multiple languages to provide personalized guidance to customers.
Additionally, B2C companies may find that their products are used differently around the world. For example, McDonald's menu is slightly different in India than in France. The company adds food items that are popular in each country and region, depending on the culture of that area. It's easy to see why other B2C companies that have to tailor their products to different international markets would need multilingual support to connect with customers.
Empowers Sales Growth
Another essential benefit of having multilingual customer support is that it can dramatically improve sales. For example, if you are an eCommerce brand that sells on Amazon and wants to expand to a new region or country, you need to translate all of your content into a new language and have a multilingual team to support those customers. This could easily double or triple the sales growth of any eCommerce company.
Gives a competitive edge
Multilingual support empowers your brand to get ahead of the competition. If other businesses in your market are lagging in this area, then this is your opportunity to shine. A recent survey by Intercom shows that 35% of people are willing to switch products to brands that offer support in their native language which means you can take on your competitors head-on and expand your market share.
Competing on product differentiation or better customer service is a much better strategy than competing on price. It changes the entire conversation.
Bolsters Brand Reputation
Expanding to new regions is not all about the short-term impact. It can dramatically impact the long-term growth of any company. Think of international expansion as a brand awareness initiative. A company expands to a new region, gets access to thousands of new customers, and potentially gets millions of impressions across its content marketing and advertising campaigns. Over time, that impact adds up, and people begin to recognize the logo or the brand name, slowly becoming a household brand.
Enhances Loyalty and Satisfaction
Studies show that 67% of customers are willing to switch brands because of poor customer service. And it turns out that a whopping 70% of customers are more loyal to brands that offer support in their native language. To expand to a new region successfully, companies must provide a high level of support in that region's native language(s).
And no, a translated FAQ page won't do the job. Customers crave that real interaction with a customer service rep who speaks their language. In fact, 29% of businesses say they've lost customers because they don't offer multilingual support, and 35% of users have said they are willing to switch products to one that provides support in their native language.
Stay Ahead of the Game with Multilingual Customer Support
So many businesses try to find the next viral marketing strategy to scale their business. They fail to see that sometimes an enhancement like multilingual customer support can make all the difference in their market position and growth. The benefits of supporting your customers in their native language across the world are endless.
Multilingual support improves customer communication, grows sales, and makes it much easier to expand to new global regions. It also puts the brand ahead of its competitors, boosts its reputation in the market, and increases loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Want to offer multilingual support but not sure how to move forward? Don't have the resources to hire an in-house support team? Helpware has the perfect solution for you. We have professionally-trained support agents that speak many languages and can help you get up to speed.
