It’s time you talk to your customer in their language, hope you’re doing it

For all the efforts your support teams put in to delight the customer profitably, one fact often goes unnoticed: language. By assuming that your customers fully understand the language your teams speak, you might be losing out on more opportunities than you can imagine.

And it’s not difficult to understand why. Your customers already have a problem they want you to solve, be it selecting the next water pump for their field, buying the best laptop, choosing the second carpet, ordering new food items online… Naturally, they don’t want to add one more problem – the problem of not being understood.

If your customers feel you aren’t speaking in their language, they can’t trust you to solve their problem. So it’s pretty much goodbye to customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and sales. Which is why it’s important for you to offer multi-lingual support.

Here’s why it matters: The Hindu, mentioning the Census 2011, reported that approximately 70% of Indians live in rural areas. Chances are English – the language your support teams – isn’t the preferred language of this 70%, which would be about 1,300MN people. Ignore their language preferences and you’re ignoring a massive customer base.

Today, the idea of excellent customer experience lies in offering support in multiple languages because today’s customer has too many options to stick to your brand unless you make their lives easier. Let’s understand some of the benefits your business will draw when you offer support to your customers in multiple languages.

Make them feel at home

Speaking to a person in a language they understand best is one of the easiest ways of establishing a connection. This is true no matter whether the setting is commercial or social. That’s because of the ways we humans are programmed: someone speaking our language  sounds more familiar, more intimate (and more trustworthy) than someone who speaks a different language.

Making your customers comfortable has a number of distinct advantages. To begin with, you can more accurately understand their needs, aspirations and challenges. That way, you are in a stronger position to recommend the most suitable solutions. More importantly, you don’t waste time you’d have otherwise wasted had you not been speaking their language. That keeps your support teams efficient and productive.

Because you speak their language, your customer is more open to deeper engagement. As a result, you get more insights into their world. You get a better opportunity to validate and fine-tune the buyer persona you have formed about your customers.

However, perhaps the most important benefit you draw is that you win the trust and respect of your customers. You win their trust because they realize there’s no communication gap between what they’re trying to tell you and what you’ve understood. That puts them at ease. Moreover, they develop a certain respect for you for having the trouble to speak in their language.

You’ve probably noticed that all the above factors build what marketing experts call customer loyalty. A customer whom you understand better, who is open to deeper engagement and who trusts and respects you is going to remain loyal to your brand because you’ve made them feel at home. 

At a deeper level, there’s what’s called the cost of switching. Because you’ve been speaking to them in their language and made them comfortable, customers feel that if they were to switch to another brand, they will have to spend a lot of time getting used to the new business. And besides, there will be uncertainty if the new business will treat them as well as you’ve been treating them. These factors and more make switching to another brand difficult and time-consuming for the customer, which is what reinforces their brand loyalty. (This doesn’t mean you can take the customers for granted, it just means your efforts are paying off well).

Enlarge the pie

Providing multi-lingual support starts with the objective of something like after-sales service and support but there are several positive and interesting by-products of substantial value.

One of them is how it brings you many more opportunities to grow sales. While increasing sales isn’t the first objective of your support teams, communicating in a way that makes customers feel more relaxed and trusting actually can benefit your sales. Here’s one of the many ways how.

Let’s say your customer is calling to inquire about spares for his vehicle. He has been using the vehicle for a while now and the part he’s looking for isn’t available with the local dealership at the moment. This is a great situation for your customer support teams to help proactively.

Your support agent would probably arrange for the spare and have it shipped. But more importantly, the agent could explain how regular maintenance would lead to fewer breakdowns or less wear-and-tear. Would the customer be interested in learning more about a 3-year service contract?

Here’s where what’s called a deal-breaker comes in. If your agent talks in the local language of your customer, it would sound more like friendly advice, rather than a typical sales pitch with shallow engagement.

Offering multi-lingual support does something which is otherwise very difficult – it increases your market size. It gives you access to customers who would have otherwise not bought from you. It lets you cross-sell more efficiently. 

Making it happen

It’s understandable that you’d love to have more people on your team who could speak different languages. But that’s not always easy; how many Tamil-proficient people, for instance,  would you hire? How would you train them? How’d you know they’re doing it right? Certainly not an easy task.

Thankfully, there is a smarter and more cost-effective way of achieving the same objective. Working with a customer support center and outsourcing the entire function would make more sense. A professional CSaaS (Customer Support as a Service) organization will help you get off to a quick start and take lots of things off your plate.