Multilingual Customer Support: What Is It and Why Do We Need It?
Prashanth Kancherla
Jan 18, 2025 | 10 mins read
Multilingual customer support is about more than just speaking different languages – it’s about reaching and retaining customers who prefer to communicate in their native tongue. When a German customer needs technical help or a Spanish-speaking client has billing questions, they want support in the language they understand best.
Think about it – wouldn’t you prefer discussing a product issue in your native language rather than struggling with translations? Your customers feel the same way.
Plus, supporting multiple languages isn’t just about translation – it’s about making your customers feel understood and valued, leading to stronger relationships and increased loyalty.
In this article, we will explore:
What Is Voice Analytics?
Voice analytics is the process of analyzing audio data from conversations, such as customer calls, to extract meaningful insights. It works by converting speech into text (using Automatic Speech Recognition) and then analyzing that text to understand context, emotions, and key information
What is Multilingual Customer Support?
Multilingual customer support lets you communicate with your customers in their preferred languages. In simple terms, it’s a system where your team can switch between languages to serve diverse customers effectively – from handling Spanish support tickets to managing Mandarin chat sessions.
When a customer reaches out, they receive assistance in their language of choice, making complex product discussions or technical troubleshooting clear and straightforward.
Why Do Businesses Need Multilingual Support?
How do you currently handle communication with clients who speak different languages? If your answer involves relying on translators or hoping for the best, it might be time to reconsider.
Offering multilingual support can greatly improve customer experience and open up new business opportunities. Some more pointers that emphasis the importance of multilingual customer support are:
- 68% of customers would switch to another brand if it offered customer support in their language.
- Only 1.35 billion people speak English globally, out of a population of 7.8 billion, showing the need for businesses to cater to a diverse audience.
- 70% of customers are more loyal to businesses that provide support in their native language.
- Businesses claim they have lost 29% of their consumers due to not offering multilingual service.
Why Your Team must Offer Multilingual Support: Key Benefits
Your customers might be speaking three different languages right now – are you prepared to help all of them? As businesses expand beyond geographical boundaries, speaking only one language limits your ability to serve customers effectively.
Let’s explore some key benefits of multilingual support for your business:
Customer Loyalty
Customers stay with businesses that make them feel understood. When they know they can get help in their native language, they’re more likely to stick around. This trust builds long-term relationships and turns customers into advocates who recommend your business to others in their linguistic community.
Competitive Edge
Many businesses still offer support in just one or two languages. Adding multilingual support sets you apart from competitors who haven’t yet bridged this gap. When customers choose between two similar products, the availability of support in their language often becomes the deciding factor.
Cultural Sensitivity
Providing support in a customer’s native language not only enhances understanding of cultural nuances but also prevents misinterpretations or loss of meaning in translation. This ensures effective communication, builds trust, and fosters a deeper connection with customers.
Better Understanding of Customer Needs
Supporting customers in multiple languages gives you insights into different market segments. You’ll learn how customers from various linguistic backgrounds use your product, what challenges they face, and what features they value most. These insights help you improve your product and service offerings.
Wider Market Reach
You might be missing out on valuable customers simply because they don’t speak your primary language. Multilingual support opens doors to new markets and customer segments.
For example, if your business serves the U.S. market, offering support in Spanish and Chinese helps you connect with millions of potential customers who prefer these languages.
Challenges Businesses Face in Providing Multilingual Support
While multilingual support offers various benefits, you’ll likely face many challenges in delivering this support effectively. Some of these challenges include:
- Maintaining consistent quality across languages: You must ensure that your multilingual customer support is accurate and culturally relevant. This involves investing in quality translation, localization (adjusting content to fit local culture), and training for agents to ensure consistency across all languages.
- Providing support across multiple time zones: Whether you choose to hire agents across regions or outsource to call centers, you’ll need to make sure your customers can reach you whenever they need assistance.
- Finding qualified bilingual staff: It’s not just about hiring people who speak multiple languages – you also need staff who understand the cultural nuances behind those languages. Recruiting and retaining these agents requires time, effort, and competitive salary offers.
- Managing different communication styles: Every language comes with unique communication norms. For instance, some cultures prefer directness, while others are more indirect. You need to offer your support team with cultural training to understand and adapt to these differences, helping them provide appropriate solutions for every customer.
Machine Translation and Human Support
Many companies implement machine translation (MT) technology to automate the translation of text on their platforms, such as app reviews, product descriptions, and FAQs. These tools can quickly scale support across multiple languages, allowing businesses to provide quick responses without needing a large multilingual team.
For example, Airbnb supports 62 languages, offering tips to hosts on how to engage with international guests. They’ve also created a community where hosts share their experiences with different cultures.
However, for more complex queries, Airbnb relies on its multilingual customer support team. For example, if a guest wants to know if a host can provide specific items like ice cream at 2 AM, they can talk to support agents who speak their language.
Localization of Content
Localization is more than just translation; it’s about adapting your content, including marketing materials, product descriptions, and even customer service tone, to resonate with local cultures. This might include adjusting the design, colors, currencies, and even the types of products or services offered to better suit different regions.
For example, in India, users can use Amazon in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and several other languages. Sellers can also contact Amazon support in local languages like Tamil or Telugu. This ensures that both customers and sellers can communicate effectively in their preferred languages.
Support Across Multiple Channels
Nowadays, customers expect to reach out for support via their preferred channels, be it chat, email, social media, or phone. Therefore, your multilingual support should be consistent across all these channels to offer a cohesive customer experience.
For example, Vodafone’s Red Connect service caters specifically to Chinese customers by providing Mandarin and Cantonese support, both over the phone and through WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging platform. This localized approach helps Vodafone connect better with its diverse customer base.
Regional Focus
Businesses often localize services based on the region they are serving. This means providing support in regional languages or setting up country-specific websites and apps can significantly enhance the customer experience by making services more accessible.
For example, Uber recognized the importance of localized services when it launched its UberCHINESE app in Toronto to serve the Mandarin-speaking population. Additionally, in Egypt, Uber introduced UberBOAT to allow users to book boats in local languages, further demonstrating how important multilingual support is to expanding Uber’s reach.
Channels Supporting Multilingual Support
To effectively provide multilingual customer service, businesses need to leverage various communication channels. And different platforms offer different opportunities to connect with customers in their preferred language. Here are some key channels to consider:
Help Centers
A multilingual help center or knowledge base empowers customers to find solutions independently. By offering translated articles and video content, you not only enhance the customer experience but also reduce the number of support tickets, allowing your team to focus on more complex issues.
Phone Support
For complex or urgent issues, phone support is often the preferred channel for customers. Having multilingual agents available to handle calls ensures that language barriers don’t interfere with delivering high-quality service.
Emails
Emails are a powerful tool for reaching a global audience. By offering multilingual email templates and utilizing translation tools, you can ensure that your customers receive personalized, language-specific communication.
Social Media
Social media platforms provide an excellent opportunity to engage with customers from different regions. You can create separate accounts for specific languages or countries, ensuring that your posts and customer interactions are relevant to each audience.
Tools to Monitor and Implement DSAT
Some tools that will help you identify areas of improvement and analyze customer sentiment are:
Speech Analytics
Speech analytics tools help contact centers get deep insights from customer conversations by analyzing tone, sentiment, and key phrases. These tools can identify recurring issues, assess agent performance, and understand customer emotions. For instance, Ozonetel’s Speech Analytics solution automates the analysis of every call and chat, enabling 100% quality assurance.
Live Monitoring Dashboard
Live monitoring dashboards provide real-time visibility into call center operations, helping managers track performance, identify issues, and take immediate corrective actions. And Ozonetel’s Live Monitoring Dashboard goes a step further by offering 100+ live reports and AI-driven insights which allow managers to monitor calls, track agent performance, and analyze sentiment in real time.
AI-powered Voice and Chatbots
AI-driven voice and chatbots help automate customer interactions, providing instant responses and improving operational efficiency. These tools use natural language processing (NLP) to understand and respond to customer queries in a human-like manner. Similarly, Ozonetel’s AI-powered voice and chat bots offer smart real-time assistance to both agents and customers.
Omnichannel Support
Omnichannel support tools allow businesses to engage customers across multiple touchpoints, from phone and email to chat and social media. These platforms help ensure consistent service, regardless of the communication channel. For instance, Ozonetel’s Omnichannel feature ensures a seamless, consistent experience for customers across all channels.
How Ozonetel Solutions Helps
Ozonetel helps businesses lower their DSAT scores with its unified CX platform. Thousands of businesses rely on Ozonetel’s powerful suite of features to deliver seamless experiences to customers at every stage of their journey. — Don’t believe us? Here are a few real-world examples where Ozonetel’s solutions made a significant impact.
PM-JAY: Improving Citizen Satisfaction with AI-based Sentiment Analysis
How do you handle a high volume of customer interactions while ensuring top-notch service? For PM-JAY, a government health initiative, the answer lay in Ozonetel’s AI-powered sentiment analysis.
This solution boosted First Call Resolution (FCR) rates and helped improve citizen satisfaction. By analyzing callers’ emotional tone, the system provided agents with the insights needed to respond quickly and accurately.
As a result, PM-JAY was able to address healthcare queries more effectively, leading to higher citizen engagement and satisfaction.
Read the full case study here!
Stockbroking Firm: Tackling High Volume with a Robust CX Platform
How do you manage rising customer queries without compromising quality? Ozonetel helped a leading stockbroking firm tackle this challenge by providing a robust customer experience (CX) platform.
With seamless integrations and intelligent IVR, the firm could route calls efficiently, reduce wait times, and offer quicker resolutions. The result? Improved operational efficiency and a more responsive, satisfying experience for their clients.
Read the full case study here!
Healthcare: Boosting Trust and Conversions Through Omnichannel Engagement
A leading health tech brand in India improved patient engagement by providing personalized communication and consistent points of contact across multiple channels like calls, WhatsApp, and more.
The result? A 36% increase in customer satisfaction (CSAT) and 54% higher conversions. By assigning a dedicated representative to each patient, the company built trust and made interactions more meaningful.
The integration of omnichannel tools enabled a seamless patient journey, with 100% compliance with patient confidentiality.
Read the full case study here!
ACKO: Accelerating Policy Resolution with a Smart Self-Service IVR
ACKO, a digital-first insurance company, improved customer satisfaction with a self-service IVR solution that reduced time spent in the IVR by 20% and sped up resolution times by 50%. With 90% CSAT, the solution allowed customers to handle claims, renewals, and policy updates without needing agent intervention.
Moreover, advanced routing and CRM integrations helped direct queries to the right teams, enhancing efficiency and driving 20% higher routing accuracy. This led to 3,000 successful self-service resolutions per month and a frictionless customer experience, setting ACKO apart in the insurance industry.
Final Thoughts: Multilingual Support & Quality CX
Providing multilingual support is important for creating an inclusive and seamless customer experience. Plus, offering services in multiple languages guarantees that every customer feels heard, understood, and valued, regardless of their linguistic background.
Ozonetel’s Speech Analytics solution is language-agnostic and analyses multilingual conversations on multiple parameters such as decibel levels, speaking rate, and participation ratio to generate automated scores for each call. This allows for quick evaluation of call quality and agent performance. With a unified, full-stack CX platform, Ozonetel simplifies managing customer journeys across all communication channels and touchpoints.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Multilingual refers to the ability to communicate in multiple languages. It allows individuals or systems to interact with people who speak different languages.
Multilingual support is offered through bilingual staff or automated tools that can translate customer inquiries. This ensures effective communication with customers regardless of their language.
Machine translation allows for quick and efficient translation of customer inquiries and responses. Plus, it helps businesses provide timely support to customers who speak different languages.
