Multilingual Chatbot: Learn How to Speak Your Customer’s Language
From our friends at Crowdin.
The power of the Internet allows you to tap into a global community, expanding into a market you may have never considered before. So now, companies that have customers in different countries with different languages can create multilingual funnels using localization and globalization strategy. Moreover, research by Common Sense Advisory has found that 76% of consumers prefer purchasing products when there’s information available in their own language – that’s a lot of potential customers!
Using our localization expertise at Crowdin, this article will outline the benefits of a multilingual chatbot for your online business and some tips on making it truly engaging.
Make Your Product Multilingual
Making your product multilingual is a significant step towards gaining global customers. The statistics show that over half of the most visited websites worldwide are in English, despite being the native language of only 16% of the population. However, there are varying amounts of information available in many other languages. Other top languages are Spanish, Turkish, Persian, French, German, and Japanese.
And their percentage usage is rising every year. Why?
Nowadays, more and more businesses realize that going global means more customers, which means more revenue and profit. Besides this, proper internationalization of your product ensures that you will:
- Enter new markets
- Receive an appreciation of users from different cultures
- Gain competitive advantage
What Are the Benefits of Multilingual Support, and Chatbots in Particular
Suppose you want to know more about the services you plan to buy, have trouble using your mobile app, or have decided to upgrade your account. Would you actually call customer service for assistance, search for their email address and contact form or just use a bot that suggests you an answer to your exact request and is available on the website page? Probably, the latter. Well, your customers do the same.
The benefits of creating a chatbot and making it available on your website include:
- Improved customer service
- Available anytime (even more important when you’ve got customers across time zones)
- Capture the interest of a buyer while they’re on your site
- Generate more leads
- Eliminate the need for a live representative
- Build trust and loyalty with your brand
- Keep visitors engaged and entertained
Making your chatbot multilingual increases the list of advantages and ensures:
- Personalized the customer experience
- Eliminate the need for a live representative speaking several languages
- Smoothen communication
- Integrating self-service support increases CSAT
Advice for Creating a Multilingual Chatbot
Many of the world’s largest brands use AI-powered chatbots and provide users with quick, easy, and intelligent support on websites and mobile apps. Sometimes they are even available in different languages, but at the same time, they are not always effective.
A fully powerful multilingual chatbot needs to be able to:
- Detect customer’s native language
- Understand exactly what the user wants
- Respond naturally
Detecting Language
Part of what makes chatbots so great for multilingual support is the ability to detect a language. The most common methods are:
- IP-based: set up the chatbot to determine a visitor’s location and native language based on their device’s IP address.
- Customer selection – effective, but not always available. The goal is to allow customers to choose their preferred language before an interaction begins.
- Web browser settings – detect the language setting of the visitor’s web browser and default to the same language.
Understanding Clients
Multilingual chatbots do not only need to have responses translated by a human ahead of time but also to understand the client’s request properly and thus provide the correct answers that will assist the users and guide them to the next step of their journey.
Does your chatbot need questions asked in a particular way to return the correct response? Do your customers have to guess the correct keywords to enter or know specific terminology to locate the right information?
Does your chatbot repeatedly tell users to try rephrasing an input that doesn’t have a direct match in the system?
If you encounter or are concerned about these types of problems with your multilingual chatbot, your best option is to train the chatbot with actual chat data and machine learning.
Making the Language More Conversational
To avoid the situation when your chatbot is providing a frustrating, negative self-service experience, follow simple rules:
Create a conversational tone
Just because users understand they are not talking to a real person doesn’t mean that your chatbot’s responses can sound monotonous and stiff. Write the bot’s responses using a conversational tone that reflects your brand and has the same type of language you use on your website and customer communications.
Add personalization
More like a bonus, not a necessity. Integrate your chatbot with backend systems so that it can provide customized responses based on that customer’s current account, funnel stage, or subscriptions. This will help you create a seamless and more personal conversation.
Multilingual Chatbots: Takeaways
If your business sells a product or service online, most likely your customers come from more countries than just the one you’re based in. And even If your chatbot speaks “global language” English, you could be cutting off entire prospect segments or reducing their likelihood of making a purchase.
Even those who speak English as a second language will still always feel most comfortable conversing in their first. This is especially true when there’s a purchase. If you want to make your business more accessible and welcoming to new markets around the world, a multilingual chatbot is a highly effective solution.
Take a look at the guide on how to build a bot that will understand your customer’s needs, mood, and context of the conversation.
This article was written by Diana Voroniak, Product Marketing Manager at Crowdin, with visuals by George Radu. It was edited by Fergus Doyle.
