Multilingual Customer Service
How Globalization Makes Languages a Need for Global Companies
When most people go to buy a product or service, they like to have someone that they can contact easily to answer any questions they have. This doesn’t change based on what language they speak, which is why multilingual customer service is becoming so important.
As the world becomes more and more globalized, people of many different languages are coming together and forming new and promising markets. Whether these people speak English, Portuguese, Mandarin, Spanish, or Korean, they want to be able to communicate with the companies they are interacting with. If they have too much trouble or the customer service is poor quality, that company is bound to lose them as clients.
At Home and Across the World
Multilingual customer service is important both globally and at home. Even though sending an email to someone in your own country might not sound like a big deal, it is. It used to take months to make the journey across some places within a single country, and now an email can make the distance in seconds. It’s important to consider that this implies that countries can be big places full of many different people. Globalization isn’t just affecting communications across seas, but being able to reach people within the same country as well. What’s more is that in this modern day and age, these people are likely to speak a variety of languages. For example, according to Michael Soon Lee, “in the U.S., minorities…hold more than $2.5 trillion in buying power.” That is a lot of money that you could be accessing if your business had multilingual customer services.
In the entire world, the native language spoken by the highest percentage of people is Mandarin. Surprisingly, the percentage of people on Earth that are native speakers of Mandarin is still only a grand total of 14.1%. Thanks to globalization, you have access to all of these people through the internet, media such as magazines, and fast moving vehicles. If your company is (or wants to go) global, then it is crucial that you make sure your company has means of communicating with foreign people in foreign markets. Who is going to purchase things that they can’t find information on?
Communication is Key
Global companies will lose customers if they don’t turn to multilingual customer services. There are many reasons for this that can be explained by first stating that modern society thrives on the ability to communicate efficiently. That is why inadequate communication can be so frustrating. If a customer has to speak in a language other than their native one to contact customer service, it can result in frustration from the customers that they can’t get their ideas across, frustration with the employees because the customer takes a long time to explain, and it can simply seem rude to the customers that they are made to speak in a foreign language.
In conclusion, multilingual customer service is crucial to the success of global companies. It will boost business both at home and overseas, and make for some satisfied customers. Rather than losing business due to poor communication, it’s best for companies to turn towards having customer service in many languages. After all, that’s where the market is headed.
Resources
- Rosetta Stone: http://resources.rosettastone.com/CDN/us/pdfs/Biz-Public-Sec/Driving-Sales-and-Satisfaction-with-Multilingual-Service.pdf
- Harvard Business Review: http://blogs.hbr.org/2009/07/how-to-build-a-multilingual-mu/
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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