For businesses, international expansion is the key to sustainable growth. A domestic market is only so big, and the best way to follow up success at home is to look abroad. That said, achieving global expansion isn’t as simple as pressing a button. Some of the most storied Fortune 500 companies — from Disney to Walmart to Starbucks — have famously struggled to break into new territories.
Doing your research to really understand international customers (their culture, behavior, values) is the single most important thing an organization can do to position itself for success in global markets. And one of the first steps in understanding your customers is to speak their language. After all, how can you really get to know anyone if you can’t effectively communicate with them?
Every global expansion strategy should center around the local customer experience in each destination. Designing a native-language customer experience puts companies on the path to acquiring and retaining loyal customers.
But let’s face it, learning dozens of languages is virtually impossible even for the most talented polyglots. And setting up an expensive customer support hub in each local market is equally impractical. That’s where Unbabel comes in.
Machine translations with a human touch
Relying on Google Translate or any similar machine-only translation service available on the internet to help with customer support comes with a few fundamental problems — the translations aren’t always 100% accurate, secure, or compliant with data privacy laws.
Here’s the thing, machines sound like machines: They fail to reliably pick up the way native speakers talk. We’re all familiar with some of the poor translations these translators deliver. There’s a whole subreddit dedicated to (comical) translation fails.
But when it comes to brands operating in global markets, poor translations can ruin the customer experience and spell doom for a business. In our Multilingual Customer Experience Report 2021, we found that more than two-thirds (69%) of global consumers believe it’s “extremely or very important” that brands offer an end-to-end customer experience in their native language. In Brazil it’s a whopping 89%, in France it’s 67%, and in Germany it’s 61%. It’s clear that in many coveted markets, native-language support is non-negotiable for the majority of customers.
Back before machine translations were available, a business would have to hire native-language translators for each market to connect with customers. But this gets costly. Now, companies can achieve their goal of global expansion by trusting Unbabel’s human-in-the-loop AI translations.
Unbabel leverages artificial intelligence and native-speaking editors to provide high-quality multilingual translations to both the support agent and the customer seeking assistance. Think of it as AI-powered and human-refined. Applying this cost-effective, hybrid technology to email and chat support allows for reliable, frictionless support without fear of something getting lost in translation. Further, the human-review layer not only allows Unbabel to offer hyper-personalized customer assistance, it helps improve the machine translations so they sound more, well, human.
Scaling globally gets a lot easier
Selling a product or service abroad is inherently risky and cost intensive. But Unbabel lowers the risk by providing native-language translations for customer support that are easy to deploy and scale. You can keep the same support team you currently employ, whether it’s under your roof or outsourced to another company. Simply integrate Unbabel into their CRM and just like that, your support agents can communicate with customers in multiple languages. The real beauty is that your customers won’t even know that artificial intelligence is involved in their support conversations.
The Unbabel advantage
Unbabel allows businesses to quickly test their products in new markets. The software is fully GDPR and CCPA compliant in keeping with data privacy laws. Powerful encryption and anonymization protect your information as well as your customers’ data. Best of all, integrating the software into your existing tools and channels is easy, allowing you to expand your email and chat support capabilities with no interruption to your current workflows.
Make Unbabel a part of your global expansion strategy
When Concentrix, a major consumer electronics and networking technology company, was looking to scale customer support operations across new languages in Asia, they turned to Unbabel. By leveraging Unbabel’s AI-powered translation solution, English-speaking Concentrix agents could provide native-language email and chat support in Thai, Korean and Japanese without sacrificing translation quality or response times.
Cocentrix now maintains high-quality multilingual customer service operations in over 50 countries and across 27 languages. Check out the case study for the full story on how Unbabel helped drive Concentrix’s global expansion strategy.
Interested in learning about how to successfully break into the German market? Explore our Germany Expansion Guide, which has everything you need to know about succeeding in Deutschland!
