How to Build a Multilingual, Multicultural Customer Experience

Customer service experience can be a critical business differentiator। Many companies — from American Express to Zappos — have found business value in creating satisfying customer service experiences across channels. Now that markets are more and more global in nature, some companies are finding value in making customer service experiences multilingual and multicultural: delivered in the business and regulatory context of local markets and tailored to the language and culture of the customer.

While these multilingual, multicultural customer experiences (MMCE) are relatively common in face-to-face customer service, they are often ignored in contact center customer service। The following is a step-by-step approach for businesses to determine their needs for MMCE, and tips for implementing MMCE in the customer contact center.

1। Assess the importance of customer serviceBefore getting started, ask how important customer service is to your business strategy. For example, if the lynchpin of your business differentiation and branding is low prices, product excellence, or operating efficiencies, a focus on MMCE may not make sense.

2। Assess target marketsNext, you need to clearly understand what countries and customer segments constitute your target market. This will help assess the need for MMCE, and identify what languages to support in your MMCE strategy. In many cases, this will be obvious — English for the Unites States or the United Kingdom and French for France. In other cases, you may need demographic information contained in census data about the primary and secondary languages spoken in your target markets.

You can also find language preferences through primary customer surveys and in fact, you may find that customers may have different language preferences for different communication channels। For instance, English may be OK for email and chat but not for phone in many countries.

3। Assess the scope of customer queriesCustomer queries fall into broad categories of varying complexity and interaction depth: informational (What is my account balance?), transactional (Can you help fill out my online form), advice-seeking (What calling plan and phone model are suitable for my lifestyle?) and diagnostic (My printer does not work) as illustrated in the figure below:

The more complex the queries are, the higher the need is for MMCE। On average, transactional, diagnostic, and advice-seeking queries present more service differentiation opportunities through MMCE than informational ones.

4। Train agentsDespite the increasing use of self-service, agent-assisted customer service is here to stay. Due to globalization, cross-cultural communication has become a vital part of every agent's training more than ever before. Make sure to cover topics such as vocabulary, tone, and cultural etiquette. Clearly, this is more important in phone interactions than in other channels such as email due to its real-time, high-touch nature. This should be supplemented with voice modulation training and accent neutralization for offshore phone agents.

5। Adopt culturally-nuanced policies and practicesCustomer service policies and practices are often implemented with little or no consideration to cultural aspects. For example, think twice before implementing cross-selling or upselling. In some countries, it may not be polite to cross-sell even at the end of a successful customer service interaction. Likewise, a 48-hour response time for email queries may be acceptable in some cultures but tantamount to ignoring the customer in others. Another example is the use of informal salutation (i.e. addressing by first name) and communication tone in the United States versus the more formal salutation and tone that may be better suited for many other English-speaking countries.
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/07/how_to_build_a_multilingual_mu.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-TOPICEMAIL-_-AUG_2009-_-STRATEGY1