Expanding the business and going global is the ultimate aim of every business. After you exhaust your local market demands and your initial growth plateaus, it’s only fitting that you want to tap into new markets and opportunities. In the past, global expansion was costly, time-consuming, and even risky. But today, going global is reduced to a matter of adopting a few new communication channels and marketing campaigns in your strategy.
And the single entity that will help you achieve all this, is a help desk. Beyond identifying untapped markets and the best market fit, the most essential factor in global expansion is your ability to support overseas customers. They don’t speak your language, they don’t know your product exists, and they don’t know how credible you are yet. You can’t get by with hiring a few regional language speakers or adding a translation feature to your digital channels. You need more than that, you need an all-in-one help desk to cut through language barriers, mediocre support, exorbitant prices, and compromised operational efficiency.
Omnichannel customer service is key
Companies are trying to reach more international markets thanks to rapid globalization and internet adoption rates. They are finally understanding that brand presence is more than just a website. Customer interactions may come from different channels like emails, phone calls, social media, real-time messaging, and mobile app. Maintaining brand consistency across multiple channels and multiple touchpoints can be difficult. An omnichannel help desk can help you provide seamless customer engagement and hence better support. It is essentially an all-in-one contact center software that helps you centralize the customer data across all your support software and CRM.
An omnichannel approach to the customer experience is vital to making your brand efforts consistent in your global platform.
Bridging the language gap with a help desk
When you have spent time aligning your product and service development with the local market’s demands, you would ideally expect more sales and revenue opportunities. In contrast, you see global customers bouncing off your website amidst a potential purchase or an acquaintance session. Why? Either you don’t understand the local market well or you can’t communicate clearly with your local audience.
74% of customers claim that they are likely to buy from a brand that offers customer service in their preferred language.
Multilingual customer service is essential for companies that want to build long-term customer relationships with a commitment to speak in their native language. Inclusivity is important, particularly in the customer service experience, where miscommunication can lead to frustration and disappointment for both communicating parties. There is in fact a proven correlation between catering to customers in their preferred language and customer satisfaction. A help desk essentially helps you tackle the language barrier with advanced understanding capabilities rather than literal back-and-forth transliteration. A dynamic combination of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing make help desks capable of understanding the intent and purpose of the customers, not just their words.
HappyFox product developers capture this capability in our multilingual help desk software. With a few simple settings, you can cater to customers in 35 languages. A basic translation tool would save you cost, but whatever you’ve saved will quickly evaporate in terms of operational inefficiencies and mediocre communication. You need the understanding capabilities of a translation tool and the efficiencies and accountability of a help desk. HappyFox Multilingual Help Desk is purpose-built for international expansion, maximizing your customer support and trust-building efforts.
Multilingual customer service 101
Multilingual customer service helps you forge and nurture positive relationships with international customers. Read more.
Self-service: Moving from problem management to problem prevention
Going global should be a carefully laid step-by-step process that evaluates the cost and time involved against the potential business turnover. You should think through particularly when the stakes are high, like hiring a local support team or getting an office space. These are not your absolute priorities when you start out global, because you could be chasing after a depleted market you guess is untapped. The ideal way is to closely align your offerings with the local market needs and customer expectations, and continuously monitor and optimize the outcomes.
Until then, you need to diligently engage your potential customers and keep the conversation going. Because every interaction is a step closer to establishing credibility with your customers and conveying the unique value you hold over the local competitors. To do so you need to be available to customers at all times. Hiring more agents is not the way to do that.
Self-service is.
You can use a knowledge base and FAQ pages to keep your customers from dropping off with unanswered questions. You can also use a chatbot, which covers any non-working hours of your support agents. Unlike humans, they don’t experience cognitive fatigue. They can handle grunt work with ease, which will come in handy when your customer base grows to a point where you get a lot of repetitive customer requests.
Self-service offers options like community forums where you have customers helping each other and learn from past resolutions. HappyFox Knowledge Base is multilingual with the capability to host information in over 14 languages.
Thus, a self-service strategy helps you cash in on every opportunity to interact with your international customers and build trust and retention.
HappyFox Help Desk makes global expansion easy
Expanding your business globally is not an overnight task. But technological advances have made possible a myriad of tools and resources to ease your way into the international markets, the help desk being the primary one. Having a centralized, well-maintained help desk with multilingual capabilities and omnichannel experience will help you build beneficial customer and employee relationships regardless of geography.
HappyFox Help Desk helps you connect your people, processes, and products no matter how apart. Schedule a demo to discuss your global business needs with our product experts.
