Why and how do you manage multilingual customer relations?
In the digital age, providing a multilingual customer service is no longer regarded as a competitive advantage but rather as a sine qua non condition for satisfying and retaining customers and ensuring that each and every one of them receives the same quality of service, irrespective of their language, culture or location.
The importance of multilingualism has also increased with the development of multichannel and digital remote customer services in numerous sectors, including e-commerce.
Languages pose a dilemma: how do you integrate different languages and improve the customer experience?
When all’s said and done, a good multilingual strategy always goes beyond the language used!
Customer Service, Multilingual Hubs: essential support for customer empowerment?
A multilingual customer service is a real strategic centre, enabling brands to provide customers with the best services available in line with their needs, provided by a single organisation.
A few keys to success garnered from positive experiences:
- Bring all your team together in person so as to anchor and embody the brand in an immersive area
- Pay close attention to recruitment: 100% multicultural so as to be able to interact with 100% of customers
- Facilitate tailor-made initial and in-service training programmes in order to ensure that advisors intuitively understand all the cultural specificities in customers’ and international and “Made in France” brands’ development strategies
- Entrust the customer service with the mission of being the customer’s mouthpiece, their observatory
- Equip yourself with tools enabling identification of the customer’s exact profile and the language used or chosen and their country of origin, in order to steer interactions towards the right language and sociocultural skills
- Choose a location and/or technological solutions able to cover time zones
Trust and customer loyalty are at stake
International brands trying to attract consumers on new markets must commit to providing personalised experiences.
One mother tongue, yes! But more than one culture!
In order to really understand your customers, you must be able to speak their language fluently. But it isn’t just about grammar: it’s also a question of culture.
Expressions, ways of communicating – people don’t always express their feelings in the same way from one country to another. Messages that don’t take this into account may be misinterpreted.
Conversations in the customer’s mother tongue combined with emotional intelligence adapted to cultural diversity increase trust and “care”.
Once you’ve understood the main advantages of a multilingual, multicultural customer relations strategy, several goals have been achieved:
Increase in customers’ loyalty and trust. A conversation in the mother tongue establishes trust, which is essential at every stage in the customer journey and so increases brand loyalty.
Better customer experience. Broader scope for customers. Multilingual assistance enables a brand to access a wider market and interest an international target in its offers, services, products and values.
Sales potential. From service to sales, advisors learn to know a local culture’s expectations and so help increase the likelihood of making a sale considerably.
Love & Care Brand. Multicultural teams shed new light on customers and practices, and help improve experiences.
Last but not least, a personalised approach and tailor-made production systems that give customers the feeling that they’re being listened to and seen are the best response to all strategic and operational challenges, and ensure the right proximity/cost/quality balance to accompany a fast-growing company’s international expansion.