For every growing organization or business there comes the point when a question arises: how do you provide good customer service to customers speaking multiple languages?
You can start with a multilingual help center, chatbot, and live chat support. With Сrowdin, you can talk to your customers in their language. Use real-time machine translation to take care of live chat and support tickets in multiple languages on Zendesk, HubSpot, Intercom, and more with Crowdin apps. It can help increase conversions, improve the customer experience and loyalty, and is cheaper and more efficient than hiring multilingual customer service agents.
In this guide, you will learn how a multilingual live chat can help your business, its meaning, and how to implement it.
What Is Live Chat Translation?
If you have a live chat on your website, the translation feature is an option your agents can use when assisting customers that don’t speak the same language as they do.
In a nutshell, this app instantly translates customer requests and agent responses from one language to another. This lets your agents chat with customers in their native language in real-time.
Why Offer Real-Time Chat Translation for Your Customers
When an agent gets a message, it is instantly translated into English or another language selected by the agent. When an agent types a response, it instantly translates into the customer’s language.
Suppose a multilingual live chat doesn’t use real-time translation. As a result, copying a message, pasting it into a translator in a different tab, waiting for it to translate, copying it again, and pasting it back into the chat will slow things down.
Delays are one of the worst things in a live chat. Translation problems can cause slow response times, which frustrates customers and leads to a high rate of customers giving up and a low rate of problems being solved the first time.
The Benefits of a Multilingual Live Chat
English is the business language of choice worldwide. But if you want to talk to your customers, you must speak their language and use the channels they already use. People like doing business (and buying things) in their language and value getting fast, high-quality help.
There is a lot of evidence for this:
- Live chat is the most popular way for customers to get help.
- At 85%, customer satisfaction with live chat is second only to phone support, which has a 91% rating.
- 42% of Europeans say they never buy things in languages other than their own.
- 56.2% of consumers say that getting information in their language is more important than price.
- 78% of people are more likely to buy from an online store that speaks their language.
Most businesses have trouble setting up a multilingual live chat strategy that works. This situation benefits other companies that can offer personal, practical support on a large scale.
Take the stress out of connecting with your customers or employees by giving everyone live chat support in their native language. Crowdin’s plugin gives your team the tools to help people via chat and email in any language you choose.
Crowdin lets your agents chat in different languages in real-time. Want to know how to do it?
How to Use Multilingual Live Chats for Your Business
Assists international visitors in navigating your website and providing immediate assistance in their native language.
Adapt to your international audience
By providing multilingual services, you demonstrate that you understand your clientele and desire to support them in communicating their needs and inquiries.
Use the customer’s preferred method of communication
Customers already have a more convenient way to contact you and ask the questions they need urgent answers to, thanks to the live chat. Many clients don’t like emails or calls, primarily if they must type out lengthy texts or speak to someone on the phone.
Live chat that incorporates automatic machine translation helps clients communicate more effectively. The removal of linguistic barriers enhances the consumer experience.
Support staff that speaks many languages costs businesses extra
According to statistics, in 2021, the average yearly pay for a customer service agent in the United States will be $30; however, bilingual customer service employees will earn $33 instead.
Set aside the fact that finding a polyglot who could translate in as many languages as chat translation would be challenging.
The ideal situation would be to work with a couple of multilingual agents who can communicate in some of the most widely used languages, including English, Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, French, Spanish, and German.
Because your clients and consumers come from around the world, this option is still constrained. Even if you added a few additional languages, folks who don’t speak the languages you offer might find it more challenging to do business with you.
Increased brand recognition
The foundation of a brand’s reputation is a positive client experience.
Chat translation demonstrates to visitors to your website that you are concerned about their visit. Their interactions with your customer service representatives—often their only direct lines of communication with your staff— impact how they view your brand.
Your customers will value your attempts to interact with them in their native tongue. It demonstrates your willingness to go above and beyond for your customers. Customers who feel valued are more likely to stay with your brand longer.
How to Provide a Multilingual Live Chat with Crowdin
Chat communication requires instant responses because that’s what people expect when they choose chat instead of email. According to a report by Zendesk, most people can expect a response to a message within 10 minutes, and the first response to real-time chat takes almost 2 minutes. If you’re doing faster than that, you must be doing a good job. Translating customer requests and support responses can slow you down if not done right.
That is why Crowdin offers a solution for real-time chat translation. You can help people worldwide by offering live chats in more than one language. Crowdin, a localization software, has many chat translation apps. These apps support multiple languages to fit the customer’s language.
Also, Crowdin Translation Companion is a new plugin that helps support multiple languages. It’s in both Chrome and Firefox. With this localization tool, you can translate messages from your customers and reply to them by choosing the language you want to translate from and into.
For languages you don’t know, you can also use machine translation. You can translate your customers’ chats, tickets, and emails if you install it.
Crowdin Translation Companion for live chat translation
With Crowdin Translation Companion, you can leverage machine translation engines to communicate with your customers worldwide. Translate messages and your responses to provide multilingual customer support.
To use this add-on, you must log in to your Crowdin account, where the organization admin or manager has already connected this app and configured the MT engine.
Select languages you speak so that this add-on won’t suggest translations for them. For all the other languages - translation will be suggested for each message. Languages are detected automatically, or you can select the message and choose the language to translate from and into.
If you install Crowdin Translation Companion, you can translate customer chats, tickets, and emails from:
For example, with the help of Intercom Emails and Chats, you can talk to your customers worldwide in their languages. By integrating with Intercom, your team can offer support in multiple languages.
After your team installs this app to chat in different languages and the Crowdin Translation Companion browser extension, all incoming messages will be translated into their language, and outgoing messages will be translated into the customer’s language.
Crowdin Translation Companion will automatically translate messages. You can also click the right mouse button on the text you want to translate and choose Crowdin Translation Companion.
Here’s an example of how the Intercom customer service tool works with the plugin:
How to configure the chat translation
The organization manager must set up the Machine Translation engine in Crowdin Enterprise after installing this app. Crowdin Enterprise works with Microsoft Translator, Google Translate, DeepL Translate, Amazon Translate, and other MT engines.
Then, you’ll need a Crowdin Enterprise account to use the configured MT engine. Install a browser extension for Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, sign in, and choose your native language and any other languages you know well enough that you don’t need to translate.
All the messages from Zendesk, HubSpot, Intercom, Kustomer, Zoho, and Freshdesk would be translated by Crowdin Translation Companion.
Conclusion
Visitors to a website shouldn’t be limited by location or language. That is why customers need to have an opportunity to get the information they need right away through multilingual chat. Some questions can be answered by a bot, while others need to be answered by a real person who knows your company and your services in the customer’s language.
Hope that these tips and tools have given you some ideas about how to set up your chat support for people from all over the world.
With Crowdin solutions for Zendesk, Help Scout, HubSpot, Intercom, Kustomer, Zoho, and Freshdesk, you can give any company’s customer service team accurate live chat translations that are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
