Benefits of Implementing Multilingual Chatbots

Guest post by Una Rouz. Una is a content specialist and AI enthusiast at DevTeam.Space  – a community of developers and development teams.

According to recent research, 69% of customers prefer chatbots for quick communication with brands.

These smart algorithms can do wonders for customer engagement, experience, and in turn, retention, as unlike customer support agents, they’re available 24/7 and can handle more than one customer at a time.

Download our free e-book to learn everything you need to know about chatbots for your business.

With the help of technology advancement, the current chatbots are a far cry from their generic, robotic predecessors whose capabilities rarely went beyond providing simple answers and closed-ended question troubleshooting.

Here are some benefits of having a multilingual chatbot on your website.

Your Customers Can Use Their Native Language

We’re currently witnessing an artificial intelligence revolution which disrupts chatbots and turns them into the conversational tools that can talk to, and most importantly, understand customers and their needs.

And “understand” is meant in the broadest possible sense – the latest chatbots can speak hundreds of different languages.

English holds the third spot of the most spoken languages list, with 379 million native speakers, which means that you can target and engage only 7.5% of the global population by using it.

Most people, even those who are proficient in English, feel more comfortable when they’re purchasing and solving product issues in their mother tongue.

It’s also worth mentioning that, customers are more likely to stay longer on a website that is in their native language.

So, it’s obvious that you need to go the extra mile and reach out to your target audiences in a manner that respects different linguistic nuances and peculiarities. It’s not enough to localize your FAQ section, product pages, and knowledge databases – offering customer service in any potential language your customers use is a must.

Given that’s is too expensive, not to mention practically impossible, to hire customer support reps for a number of languages in order to streamline the communication and improve the conversion rate on your website, multilingual chatbots are your best shot.

Chatbots, voice assistants and AI, stay informed with the free Onlim newsletter.

You Company Can Gain a Competitive Edge

According to 64% of people, customer experience is more important than pricing when it comes to making a purchase, which makes it an important tool for gaining a competitive edge on the market.

In other words, if your website is more personalized and customer-oriented than that of your competitors, you’ll be able to obtain a larger market share, even if your products or services come with a hefty price tag.

Multilingual chatbots capable of interacting with your customers in their own preferred languages can provide your website with an important functionality and improve your conversion rates.

You Can Reach a Wider Audience

Breaking down the language barrier is vital for any business.

If you want to take your business globally, it’s essential to make sure that prospects in your new markets get customer service they want and deserve.

This means that your chatbot should speak and understand as many languages as possible.

Generally speaking, people are more inclined to trust brands that put in the extra effort in order to understand their needs and pain points better. Moreover, by allowing your clients to provide the feedback in their own language, you’ll collect more accurate data which will provide you with a useful insight into how to fix potential issues and offer all your customers exactly what they need.

You Can Save a Lot of Time and Money

Handling a number of customer requests can be a challenging task, especially when they come from different parts of the world and use different languages.

Even if you focus only on a single area in which a couple of languages and dialects are spoken, it would be too expensive and inefficient to hire and onboard customer service reps.

Long waiting times are among the major reasons why customers churn and hang up on you – and 34% of those who do, never come back and leave your company for your competitor.

But, if you implement a multilingual chatbot, you’ll both eliminate the waiting time issue, and streamline the troubleshooting process.  The fact that your customers will be able to ask questions and get the answers they need in their own language will boost your company’s efficiency in resolving potential problems.

Chatbots Can Be Taught Manners, Too

All of us have a bad day every once in a while, and those are the times when every little thing can push us over the edge.

Customer service reps don’t have such a luxury, but they’re still human and a nervous or dissatisfied customer can press all the wrong buttons which can result in bad customer experience and churn.

However, chatbots don’t have emotions, at least yet, and they’re always polite and patient no matter how angry a customer is, which is very important for the course of the entire conversation.

Besides, multilingual chatbots can be programmed to respect different cultural subtleties and distinctions – for example, how people from a particular region greet one another.

As you can see, a multilingual chatbot can make a real difference when it comes to scaling your business and expanding to the global market successfully.