How Translation Services Help Support Teams with International Customers
In a growing globalized economy, translation services can provide valuable assistance to the support operations of companies. For businesses with either external customer support and internal IT support needs – or both – that cater to international customers from multiple language markets, accurate translation is often crucial to providing quality customer service and support.
To better describe the need for, and opportunity of, translation services, here’s a list of three ways in which your customer support operations will benefit from them.
1. Providing Multilingual Customer Service as Your Company Grows
If you want your company to expand globally, then multilingual customer service – internally and externally – is unavoidable. In fact, it’s one of the main pillars of a successful global business strategy. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with catering to one language market – or using a single “corporate” language for employee support – and some businesses are fine with what they have. However, there might be a point in time that your business finds that the next step is expanding globally.
In terms of externally-facing support, of course, the English market is big enough on its own – consisting of 1.5 billion potential English customers. But, even adding one more language market such as Mandarin can increase your company’s reach by over 900 million. Try adding a few hundred million more if you ever decide to expand and cater to the Western and Eastern European market. All in all, multilingual customer service is what makes your business more accessible to multiple language markets. It needs translation services.
2. Ensuring Accurate Communication with Translation Services
When it comes to good customer service, accurate communication is the key. When catering to international employees and customers, accurate translation is an inevitable part of expanding operations worldwide. This is especially true when translating highly technical and even contextually sensitive terms. In these situations, absolute accuracy is a must each and every time. Even a single mistranslation might lead to confusion and dissatisfaction with your company’s customer service or, internally, cause revenue-affecting delays to the resumption of technology-enabled business operations.
Error-free translations also improve support-personnel work productivity. There’ll be fewer instances of back-and-forth clarifications on matters that might take time to resolve. Depending on the complexity of the issue, some might even take days to fix. The less time it takes to address an issue, the happier the customer will be. In short, delivering accurate translation in real-time equates to a more productive and potentially profitable support transaction.
3. Learning to Localize Your Translation Services
Accurate translation, as important it already is, makes up only part of what translation services can provide. Another central element to translation services is their expertise in localization. Translation services employ native-level speakers that are knowledgeable in the endemic context of the languages they specialize in. This includes the unique cultural and societal peculiarities of a language market. They’ll find the best translation that best fits the linguistic, cultural, and societal context of the customer’s location.
They take into consideration factors that might “tickle” the local audience to catch their attention. They also avoid possibly offensive terms specific to that language and cultural group. This is especially important since there are regional differences in each language, along with multiple vernaculars and dialects.
It’s very important for both externally-facing and internal IT support staff to collaborate with translation services that have the interpretation skills to break down linguistic and cultural obstacles. In the end, this is to create not only accurate, but also meaningful, interactions. It’ll drive up both customer confidence and that of your support staff as they become more knowledgeable and experienced in catering to multiple language markets.
Apart from quality products and services, a company’s brand also depends on the quality of support that clients receive. The greater the global reach your company has, the greater the reason for your external support staff, and perhaps also your IT support staff, to provide multilingual support.
Is your organization supporting one or both of international employees and customers? If so, what translation services challenges are you facing? And what are you doing to alleviate them? Please let me know in the comments.
Ofer Tirosh
Ofer Tirosh is the part-time editor at StudyClerks and CEO of Tomedes, a language service provider delivering technical translation and localization services to businesses all over the world.
