How do you manage multilingual customer support?

Managing multilingual customer support can be a complex task, but with proper planning and implementation, it is possible to provide excellent service to customers in different languages. In nutshell, managing multilingual customer support requires careful consideration of language coverage, staffing, routing, translation resources, training, knowledge base localization, feedback, collaboration, quality assurance, and continuous improvement. By implementing these strategies, you can provide effective support to customers in different languages and ensure a positive customer experience.

Choosing the languages for your support centre means that you need to check the following: 1. What are the primary countries or regions where you want to sell your product or service? 2. What languages do your existing customers speak? 3. Are there any features that are particularly relevant to customers in certain countries or regions? 4. What languages do your competitors support? This can give you an idea of what languages are essential to customers in your industry. Once you have considered all of these factors, you can start to create a list of the languages that you want to support. You should start with a small number of languages at first, and then add more languages as your business grows.

This starts at the planning phase, also from an economic perspective. Number of clients + revenue to determine if local language support is to be provided. This can be absorbed by hiring bi-lingual agents at A1 level in both languages. Use of modern chat translation tools can assist with wider coverage, but doesn’t beat fluency especially with tech support where 1-2-1 conversations are required.

One thing I'd add, would be to offer slightly higher pay to those support agents with multilingual skills (when possible, without going out of budget), as it is incredibly hard to switch languages all the time - especially since they're usually expected to work on multiple languages throughout a working day when there are no native language customers to attend to. They'd also be reviewing documentation in both languages and helping update them, among other activities often times overlooked. Overall, this could help with motivation and visibility of the skills they bring to the table. Happy customer support agents usually translate into happy customers, and that can make multilingual customer support even stronger in companies.