Language has a profound impact on the customer journey. When we think about customer experience (CX), there are many factors we should consider. The words we choose matter. Words are a key part of conveying the brand’s voice and identity and building a specific way to interact with our target audience. How can we transform language to make it more effective and to improve the customer’s experience?
What is extremely important to take into account is that customer experience isn’t something that occurs just by mistake or luck. It may seem obvious, but many companies should pay more attention to the experience they provide to their users on their websites, apps or digital platforms, in general. For the customer journey to be engaging, there must be a meticulously designed and user-focused strategy in place.
Why is customer experience important?
Customer experience creates loyalty and positive feelings around the brand. It also allows companies to differentiate more effectively. Through CX, businesses are able to personalize their relationship with the customers. As language service providers, we can’t ignore the importance of CX.
The world we live in is interconnected. To land on new businesses, we need to know their culture and language, otherwise we would be wasting growth opportunities. But how can we improve the perception that our clients have of our brand?
Multilingual support
Multilingual support is essential when thinking about the customer journey. We live in a globalized world and we should consider giving all our several audiences content they understand and feel comfortable with. This means adapting messages to different target languages. According to an article published by ICMI, 74% of consumers are more likely to repurchase if after-sales care is offered in their language.
This organization conducted a study on multilingual customer service to understand how contact centers support non-English language clients. Through this research they tried to analyze if multilanguage support could improve on CX and impact positively on engagement and loyalty.
They analyzed the way in which language impacts contact centers, and these are some of the results they obtained:
- 79% of them have customers who aren’t native speakers of the primary language(s) that they serve.
- 60% of those customers expect service in their native language.
- Quality scores increase when they receive support in their language.
- The majority of contact centers expect the volume of multilingual interactions to increase.
Customers prefer their native language
Other study made by CSA Research shows that throughout customer journey, clients prefer content made in their mother tongue. They carry out a survey with 8,709 respondents in 29 countries in their native language. They found that in spite of living in a globalized world, where most of the population speaks English as a second language, consumers still prefer to receive information in their native language. Some of their findings were:
- 39% of the respondents prefer to buy from websites in their native language. This number increases to 67% in the case of people who don´t read English well.
- The information that buyers can read is essential in the purchase decision. 66% of respondents said that they would always choose information given in their native language.
- Local-language improves the customer relationship. 75% of the customers expressed that they would purchase the same brand again if customer care was in their language.
How to improve the customer journey?
Brand communications should help people to have an enjoyable and delightful customerr experience. The customer journey can be improved by using simple terms in the native language of the users. Also, user experience is fundamental: the navigation through a website should be intuitive and easy to do. Some brands are using edgy strategies and others are evoking emotional language by telling stories of the people behind the brands.
For most organizations, their global footprint is growing, so they have to diversify their user experiences. In this way, it is inevitable to think about a more strategic, scalable, and cost-effective approach to language support.
Some key aspects to consider to improve the customer journey through language are:
- Listening to the audience. It is essential to value the customer’s feedback.
- Employees should be trained on the company’s products and services, as well as protocols. If not, they would not know how to respond correctly to client’s questions and demands.
- Identifying your company’s language opportunities. Analyze how your audience is conformed and their main locations, to adapt your content to their language.
- Determining a multilingual approach and building a business case based on that approach.
- Hiring offshore workers. To enhance your customers’ experience in a wide range of language varieties it could be key having a multilingual staff.
- Localize your content to assure that it really reflects the cultural usage and is meaningful to your audience.
If you want your business to go global and provide a much better customer journey experience, then you should definitely consider hiring a strategic linguist ally.
References
https://customerthink.com/multilingual-support-and-how-it-can-boost-customer-experience/
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