Translating Customer Support and FAQs: A Must

Far from public attention, customer support has changed beyond recognition over the past years. Where once a customer had the option of either calling or writing an email to any given customer support, most companies have radically changed the way they handle queries, complaints and other common support issues. This is as true for banks, as it is for airlines, telecommunication providers, e-commerce platforms and any other business you can think of – and customer support translation plays a crucial role as we shall see.

Depending on the need, companies used to maintain customer support desks counting anywhere from a few to a few dozen representatives handling nonstop calls and mails. Technology began upending that some time ago, but there occurred another leap forward within just the last few years. Let’s use the above-mentioned airlines as an example.

Once upon a time, travel agencies were the go-to service for booking flights and hotels, alongside a series of other amenities. The internet abruptly changed that, and after most airlines began offering online booking options, cutting out the middleman, aggregators like Expedia and Kayak introduced another kind of middleman, allowing anyone to compare fares and book the most suited option for themselves. But many returned to booking directly from airlines, especially during covid, as the ensuing flight cancellation mayhem left many people stranded without a point of contact. But in such volatile times, it is difficult to gauge current and future needs of customer support, which is probably why chatbots became increasingly popular. Bots don’t need to be paid, they don’t need rest, and they can handle many queries without any human interference. And artificial intelligence made them even more useful.

Customer Support Chatbots

By now, most of us are familiar with such AI bots. It begins by clicking on the support icon on a company’s website. That sends you to a support site or even WhatsApp, where a chatbot will offer you several options after an introductory message. Do you want to cancel your booking? Amend it? Inquire about flight information? Do you have questions about in-flight service? And so on…

Clicking on any of the options will open another series of options to further drill down on your query. This might go on for another 4 or 5 rounds, until your question has either been answered or the bot can no longer assist you and will then, and only then, transfer you to a human representative. In most cases, this new system is a win-win for everyone, since the customer doesn’t need to hold endlessly until he gets through to a representative, and the company saves insane amounts of money by retaining only a core team of customer support representatives to handle the outstanding queries.  

Multilingual Customer Support

The above might be fairly straightforward, but one element that takes this much further – the fact that it allows for multilingual customer support. Imagine the difficulties of establishing support teams in different regions for different languages, regardless of the size of the client base. As so many companies offer services way beyond the physical borders of their headquarters, they must also offer customer support in those regions. Now that these chatbots are largely responsible for handling much of the support, all that must be done is to translate the bot’s messages.

While traditional customer support could always have been offered in a few global languages, like English and Spanish, there is a vast difference in the customer experience when he or she is now largely communicated with in his or her language and only needs to resort to their foreign language skills in specific cases. As such, the AI chatbots not only streamlined customer support for both the business and the client, but allowed international businesses to operate more effectively in any region they choose to.  

FAQs

Frequently asked questions and answers (FAQ) is another tool companies discovered a while ago that goes a long way in reducing unnecessary costs. Since a large number of questions customers might have are similar, FAQs are readymade solutions to group these queries and provide quick fixes instead of representatives tediously answering them one by one. FAQs are also good for SEO because they naturally resemble popular search phrases, thereby ranking high on search engines and delivering a promotional element alongside their solutions for customers. Translating FAQs is therefore naturally profitable – not only because it solves many of the questions, but also because it will help companies rank higher in different regions and languages.

How to Translate Customer Support and FAQs?

Now that we established the need to translate customer support bots and FAQs, the obvious question is how. Since most AI programs have translation capabilities, it’s tempting to rely on them to also translate the texts. However, since small misunderstandings and translation errors can render the FAQs confusing or even incomprehensible, rendering the chatbots entirely useless and defying the reason for their implementation, it is recommendable to make the small investment of professionally translating the FAQs and chatbots’ messaging arsenal. This will ensure seamless communication with customers and allow for the remaining AI-generated responses to be as accurate as possible.

As with many other cases, the lazy approach (to not translate professionally) can lead to costly errors that shrink the cost of the original translation. Furthermore, in the case of FAQs, intelligent professional translations can actually help improve SEO in different languages. Relying on flawed AI translations can result in unintended complications in supporting (sometimes desperate) clients, sometimes even alienating, or worse, offending them, opening up a whole new range of things that can go wrong. Making the relatively small investment of translating customer support will go a long way in saving money down the road, satisfying customer’s needs and streamlining communications.