If you sell a product or service online, it’s likely that your customers come from more than just the country where your business is based. If your chatbot can help users with everything from purchasing to getting customer service but only speaks English, you might turn away whole groups of potential customers. It is where a multilingual chatbot comes in.
Multilingual chatbots can help businesses in many ways, from getting more leads to making more sales. But one of the most common ways to use a bot is to give excellent customer service on demand. A multilingual chatbot is a great way to do it if you want to make your business more open and accessible to new markets worldwide.
In this article, we will explain what is a multilingual chatbot, why you need it, and we will advise on how to localize chatbots with Crowdin.
What Is a Multilingual Chatbot?
A multilingual chatbot lets online shoppers use messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or websites to get live chat and automated help in more than one language.
As AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) have improved, chatbots have started talking to people. By figuring out what the customer wants, these bots can ask the customer more questions to find out more.
Multilingual bots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and are trained before they are used to understand what the customer wants and needs for each use case. It is called multilingual Conversational AI.
It uses multilingual AI to answer questions and do simple tasks in the customer’s preferred language. Multilingual chat is eventually a must-have for brands that do business in more than one country or region where more than one language is spoken.
Brands can use multilingual chatbots for business in a few ways:
- Make a separate chatbot for each language they support.
- Use Google Translate.
- Work with an AI chatbot platform with built-in multilingual capabilities.
How do multilingual chatbots work?
Multilingual chatbots can figure out what language a customer is speaking so they can help them better. For instance, if a customer talks to the chatbot in French, the chatbot will help them in French. But if the next customer for that chatbot asks a question in English, then the chatbot will answer in English.
Building a bot that can speak more than one language will help your customers worldwide.
How Do Chatbots Figure Out Which Language to Use?
What makes chatbots excellent for multilingual support is figuring out what language a customer speaks. It is usually done in one of four ways:
IP-based
A visitor’s IP address can tell a chatbot where and what language they speak county-based. Customers can choose their preferred chatbot language before an interaction begins. It is simple and effective but not as smooth as it could be.
Web browser settings
Another great way to make the experience as easy as possible is for chatbots to pick up on the language setting of the visitor’s web browser and switch to that language by default.
HTML language attribute
HTML can be used to figure out the language of the content and make sure that the chatbot responds in the native language of the speaker.
Chatbots usually use advanced Neural Machine Translation engines to respond right away, which lets them adapt to a wide range of languages on the fly. On the other hand, chatbots that use multilingual AI might need to have their answers translated by a person before they can use them.
Benefits of a Chatbot in Different Languages
Developing a bot that can speak more than one language is a good idea for any business that wants to reach more than just English-speaking customers.
We suggest starting small: translate and localize the most-asked-questions and most-read help articles in your support center. It will let the user get the information they need right away.
Multilingual chatbots don’t just answer questions, though. You can use them to do the following:
- Engage website visitors to make more sales.
- Find out important information about prospects and get more qualified leads.
- Business tasks can be automated to save time.
- Add a personal touch to your customer service to make it better.
- Chatbots can be your brand’s “first line of defense” because they handle customer support requests, gather information, and send customers to the right place.
Make your chatbot multilingual, engage more website visitors, and make more sales
What Multilingual Chatbots Do for Your Business
Make things more straightforward for the customer
A survey of online shoppers in ten countries found that 75% of them want to make purchases in their language, or they won’t make the purchase at all. So even a user who speaks English as a second language will find it faster and easier to interact with your brand if it can be in their native language instead. To help customers with their questions, a chatbot can pull up help articles, send links to relevant web pages, answer basic questions, and even set up a sales or support call for the customer.
Save time, energy, and money
It’s impossible to train your staff in every language your customers speak. Making a multi-language chatbot is a much easier and cheaper way to deal with a multilingual customer base. As your first line of defense, chatbots cut down on the number of people you need to help so you can have more time to solve more elaborate customer requests.
Using live human agents in your primary market might make sense, but when you start to expand to other parts of the world, it can get expensive fast.
Add more customers to your list
Think about all the people who might be interested in your brand but don’t speak English. With a multilingual bot, you can show them your products or services, answer their questions, and move them further along the sales funnel. A bot that speaks more than one language can help you get many more customers.
Stand out from the rest of the crowd
A bot that speaks a customer’s preferred language will make them feel like they are understood and will be able to give better service all around. When you pay much attention to the quality of the user’s experience, you’ll have a significant competitive edge with an international audience. If a prospect has to choose between your company and one that only speaks English and knows that your company speaks their language, they are much more likely to choose your brand.
Why Should a Chatbot Be Localized?
The most important thing to know about localizing chatbots and other new technologies is that it’s not just about translating text. Regarding multilingual AI-based products, cultural differences and nuances in language play an even more critical role.
Besides translating answers, you must also consider gender, personality, symbols, and communication preferences. Our localization management platform ensures that the final product sounds natural and fits the needs of each culture group.
Localize Your Chatbots with Crowdin
Chatbots are the digital democratizer of our day. A chatbot is a way for a user and a computer system to talk to each other in a natural, context-based way to answer a question or fulfill a request.
Localizing a chatbot means sending the right message to the right person at the right time and place.
Make your chatbot multilingual to enter new markets, gain a competitive edge, and make it easier to talk to customers from all over the world. Install one of our apps for chatbot localization to start your localization journey and ensure that automated conversations happen in the languages your customers speak.
For example, connecting your Certainly bot to Crowdin, you can automate replies in more than one language like you automate responses in the first language. Once a chatbot has been made in one language, it can be used in other languages. Send Crowdin the original texts and have them translated. The chatbot will use your translations to talk to people in other languages. More in Crowdin+Certainly.
Each chatbot that speaks more than one language needs a different way to be localized. It is especially true for AI-based virtual assistants. Crowdin can help you make a great customer experience in any language, whether your chatbot is based on rules or machine learning.
Final Thoughts
To create a good brand experience, you must do more than make the sales process easy. You also need to help the customer after or before the sale.
And that’s the beauty of using chatbots to help people who speak more than one language. Users worldwide can get help in their language from your brand without you having to hire more people or spend more money in new markets.
