Comments on: International Customer Service: How To Help Your Customers In Any Language

By: Ralf Klein

Ralf Klein — Sun, 17 May 2020 14:52:50 +0000

Totally right with the language part! It’s an absolute horrible experience when you call somewhere and the customer agent is not able to speak your language.
Many years we had issues to deal with our German customers, since nobodys of us spoke German.
We came in touch and copperated since then with a company called Prosupo.
Our complete German customer support is outsourced to them and we experiencing better reviews on our merchant profiles.

http://www.prosupo.com can i recommend if you experience the same struggle.

By: Kevin Miller

Kevin Miller — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 11:13:11 +0000

Hi Len,
You have discussed about very common & crucial problem, that we usually ignore sometime. From both a cultural and a linguistic point of view, customers prefer to do business in their own language and it is important to understand customer preferred language. Thanks for the post!!!

By: Tiina Vainio

Tiina Vainio — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 20:25:02 +0000

Hi Len! Thanks for the article. Been thinking about these subjects a lot lately. Have to add a great translation tool and a fellow Finnish startup Transfluent https://www.transfluent.com/ for online translations on the go. Any plans on integrating it to Groove? They are with Zendesk already ;). Worth cheking out!

By: Gaurav Gulati

Gaurav Gulati — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 16:22:32 +0000

Great post, Len! As a native Non-English speaker and having worked in MNCs, every bit you said makes perfect sense. I’m also in the early stages of my B2C startup and your post just served me a reminder to not forget about Language Support in the product and customer service. Cheers!

By: Kasper

Kasper — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 07:15:58 +0000

Hi Len,

Thanks for the great insight. Any plans for Groove itself becoming more multilingual?
Things that are a bit of a hassle at the moment while dealing with English and foreign speaking customers in a Groove subscription:

– Multilingual signatures (only one language per mailbox)
– Quickreplies (now only seperate versions per language, instead of multilingual)
– The “Customer Satisfaction Ratings” app, (only one language setting for all mailboxes)
– The supportwidget (no language select, only per script)
– Autoreplies (only one language per mailbox)

I’m concerned you reached the boundaries of your product with your great content marketing, but as you touch subjects beyond the limitations of your product you might want to address these issues with Groove itself before posting. Anyway, I don’t want to be a killjoy much, always enjoying your blogposts 🙂

By: Olivier M.

Olivier M. — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 17:19:00 +0000

Hi Len,
Sure you already use it but it’s worth mentioning that Gmail offers integrated translation.
Here’s a screenshot of your email after being translated (although I actually never use this feature).

By: Anna Rys

Anna Rys — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 14:51:33 +0000

Hey Len,

Great article! Do you think we could translate it into Polish and post it on our blog as a guest post? I bet our customers would love to read it but most of them are Polish and not excellent English speakers… I mean, readers ;).

What we do ourselves is translate the e-mails we get from foreign customers via Google Translate (it’s free and you get the gist of the matter) and then translate the answer via our professional translators. Unless it’s a really simple sentence, then you can hope Google Translate won’t mess it up.

To speed up the initial response time (since the translation may take up to an hour sometimes), we have macros like “Thank you for your e-mail, we’ll get back to you as soon as we have a ready quote for you!” ready. I couldn’t recommend that enough. It adds a personal touch to the communication, especially if you have a few different macros, depending on what topic the e-mail is concerned with.

We’re all about excellent customer experience at TurboTranslations and customer service is a big part of that.

And talking about TurboTranslations… is there a way we could integrate ours (http://TurboTranslations.com) with Groove via API? 🙂 There probably is but I’m not a technical person and I’m just looking for a confirmation, so that I could forward the info to my technical co-founder :).

By: EN Vanessa

EN Vanessa — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 14:39:57 +0000

GREAT read! We use Groove to support 5 different languages, and are looking to expand even on that. We have seen such an improvement in communication and ticket resolution when the customer is working with an agent who speaks their language.

By: James

James — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 14:36:52 +0000

Hi Len,

Could you tell us how effective translating landing pages, auto response emails and support articles has been to Groove’s bottom line? This is a great topic for conversation.

Thanks