Chatbots have redefined customer service. They provide instant responses to consumers’ questions, operate 24/7, lower companies’ customer service costs by $0.50 – $0.70 per interaction, and can handle thousands of conversations at once. It’s estimated that the global chatbot market will be worth approximately $1.25BN by 2025.
However, not all chatbots are equally effective. Chatbots that only operate in a single language special database might deliver excellent customer service, but this matters little if your customers can’t understand them. Companies with a global customer base must implement multilingual chatbots.
This article explains precisely how they can do this. Specifically, it covers:
What is a chatbot? And what is a multilingual chatbot?
How does a multilingual chatbot work?
The importance of having a chatbot in different languages
Should you use a multilingual chatbot?
Approach customer service with a global lens
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What is a chatbot? And what is a multilingual chatbot?
Chatbots are automation-based tools that leverage machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and natural language processing (NLP) to interact with customers and resolve their queries. best local seo strategies for plumbers, electricians, and other professions Multilingual chatbots go one step further, simultaneously handling customer queries and providing responses in the consumers’ native tongue.
Check our guide to build your effective chatbots: A 15-step checklist to get the very most from your chatbot project.
By implementing chatbots, organisations can roll out first-class customer service at scale. A chatbot can solves problems such as communicating with customers 24/7—providing instant answers to their questions, learning more about what prospects/customers want, and helping them navigate the buying journey. Best of all, they can serve an increasing number of consumers without scaling their customer service team. Indeed, chatbots will save a staggering 2.5BN customer service hours by 2023.
But it’s not just about the internal benefits that chatbots offer organizations. In fact, chatbots are just as beneficial to consumers themselves. They receive instant, clear answers to their queries, which boosts their customer experience (CX) and increases sales. Consider that conversion rates are 98% higher when companies respond to a customer’s inquiry within the first 5 minutes. When companies implement chatbots, they automatically respond to all queries instantly. Therefore, customers are more likely to convert—and are more likely to return to the brand in the future. Win-win. According to Insider Intelligence, consumer retail spend via chatbots will reach $142BN by 2024, compared to $2.8BN in 2019.
Chatbots also provide consumers with self-service capabilities. This is ideal in today’s world, where many consumers (especially the younger generations) would rather handle issues themselves than have to speak to a live agent. For example, 49% of Gen Z-ers and 41% of Millennials prefer to use digital self-service options—aka chatbots—than to B2C Fax speak to an agent on the phone.
When you consider the multitude of internal and external benefits that chatbots offer, their meteoric rise over the past few years is perhaps unsurprising.
Read more: What Is Conversational AI?
How does a multilingual chatbot work?
There are two potential ways that multilingual chatbots can work. First, they might contain sophisticated Neural Machine Translation engines. These rely on neural networks to translate users’ inputs into a language that the chatbot understands, and vice versa when the chatbot responds to the user.
Alternatively, companies might take a more hands-on approach, partnering with translation and localisation specialists to manually translate typical user requests and the chatbots’ responses ahead of time. The most effective multilingual chatbots also use natural language understanding (NLU) to provide more effective localisation capabilities. For example, Microsoft’s NLU service—LUIS—factors in regional variations, differentiating between French spoken in France versus in Canada.
Right, but how do multilingual chatbots know which language to communicate in?