Lost in Translation is not only a cult film from 2003, but also a very real experience that retailers want to avoid at all costs when communicating with customers. This is true in person, but it’s also true online, where brands are seeing their e-commerce business grow and where customers are increasingly asking for support. Enter: multilingual chatbot.
According to Statistica, in May 2020, 52% of U.S. adults made more purchases online, with e-commerce revenue up 44.5% year-over-year. “Overnight, it’s almost 2030,” Shopify Chief Product Officer Craig Miller says in an interview with BNN Bloomberg. “Some of the things that we considered important in the coming years became super-important literally overnight.”
Merchants are now dealing with more website traffic than ever and are looking for ways to better interact and serve more online shoppers.
This is where AI-enabled multilingual chatbots come into play, helping salespeople interact with shoppers online through personalized, context-sensitive conversations in virtually any language.
Let’s dive into why it’s important for merchants to offer a personalized online customer experience and how this can be achieved with AI-enabled multilingual chatbots.
The Importance of a Personalized Customer Experience
Today, the importance and benefits of prioritizing customer experience (CX) are clear: retailers have achieved increased direct sales and improved customer loyalty by tailoring messages and customer outreach. On the consumer side, a personalized experience can decide whether they will buy a product and how much they will spend.
It is reported that 49% of customers made impulse purchases after they received a more personalized online service.
Of course, a personalized CX can mean a lot. Retailers use personalized email marketing as well as product deals and personalized offers to enhance the online customer experience. But there is a more fundamental aspect that comes into play with every customer interaction. You guessed it: language.
Break the language barrier
Language is a well-known barrier in both communication and business. Living in a bilingual city like Montreal, we deal with this on a daily basis. You say “bonjour”, someone says “hello”, and it can be difficult to know where to go next.
In a retail environment, whether in person or online, the need for multilingual service is vital to customer service and convenience. Fortunately, with modern translation technologies and AI-powered multilingual chatbots like Heyday, any language barriers a shopper encounters when shopping online are not insurmountable.
For example, if your brand operates in parts of North America and Europe, a multilingual chatbot ensures that customers receive support in their chosen language, whether they are in Spain, Germany, Canada, or anywhere else. It may seem obvious, but English is still the default for many global chatbot solutions, which can be limiting at best and repulsive at worst.
With platforms like Google Business Messages and Facebook Messenger that create a direct connection between sellers and buyers, context-sensitive chat in the customer’s preferred language is a key way for sellers to improve communication with buyers.
What is a multilingual chatbot?
The multilingual chatbot provides online shoppers with online chat and automated support in their preferred language. For brands that operate in multiple countries or regions with multiple languages, multilingual chat capabilities are a must.
Brands can implement multilingual chat in several ways: they can create a separate chatbot for each supported language, use Google Translate, or partner with an AI chatbot platform like Heyday that has built-in multilingual capabilities. Customers like DAVIDsTEA serve customers in French and English with our chatbot – no translator required!
Instead of creating a new web based chatbot for every region you sell, using a single chatbot with multilingual capabilities takes less time to deploy and is more scalable if you decide to expand into new markets. Multilingual chat is one of the pillars of an effective and scalable conversational commerce strategy.
4 Benefits of Using a Multilingual Chatbot
There are many reasons why you and your team should consider using a multilingual chatbot, especially if you already have or plan to have an international presence.
In addition to the main benefits of using AI-based chat, including 24/7 customer service, centralized customer support management, and automatic responses to order inquiries and FAQs, multilingual chat increases your business scalability, improves your customer self-service experience, and more. To make things easier, we have divided the benefits of multilingual chatbots into four categories:
🤖 Customer Engagement
📈 Sales Potential
🤝 Customer loyalty
🏆 Competitive advantage
1. Increase customer engagement
How likely are you to communicate with someone if you don’t both speak the same language?
Exactly.
The same is true between brands and potential customers.
The number one benefit of accessing multilingual live chat is that it creates a better experience for your customer and increases engagement. By adapting to their preferred language of communication, customers can get the information they need faster, resulting in a better shopping experience.
Think about it, if your client sends a request in French and your chatbot replies in English, it shows the client that they have to compromise.
It’s not very customer oriented.
Eliminate any friction in your customer’s experience by starting by communicating on their terms and in their preferred language. It goes without saying that more effective communication with customers optimizes support and sales—an advantage for both time-strapped shoppers and sales and support agents.
2. Increase sales potential
It’s no secret to retailers and their marketing teams that a personal touch can help you attract and retain more customers. In fact, a whopping 80% of shoppers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer a personalized in-store or e-commerce experience.
By integrating multilingual chat technology into your customer communication strategy, you and your team can make the most of this dynamic by not only answering customer questions in their native language, but also providing them with relevant product recommendations.
72% of shoppers are more likely to buy a product if it is presented to them in their native language.
Heyday’s artificial intelligence chatbot automatically integrates with your inventory catalog and can help your customers find the product they are looking for, as well as other items they may be interested in. Using Natural Language Understanding (NLU), our chatbot accurately identifies the keywords customers are using in a conversation and offers them the products or services you offer related to that keyword.
An example of Dynamite using the Heyday chatbot to show a client black blazers in English.
With artificial intelligence that deeply understands many languages, e-commerce merchants can increase the level of self-service capabilities of their online store and make it easier for customers to get what they want, be it products, services or support, quickly.
3. Increasing customer loyalty
You and your team know that while acquiring new customers is always a top priority, it’s equally important to maintain a good relationship with your existing clientele.
Multilingual chat can help increase customer loyalty by fostering closer connections between shoppers, local stores and their support and sales agents.
Take, for example, DECATHLON, a sporting goods retailer with outlets around the world that uses Heyday. DECATHLON has customized their chatbot for each market they serve. Whether the customer is shopping in Singapore, the UK or anywhere else in the world, the DECATHLON Chatbot communicates in the language that suits them best.
heyday
44% of consumers said they would become loyal customers after a one-to-one interaction with a brand.
Communicating with your customers in their language of choice naturally leads to clearer communication, which is a key factor in effective communication—the foundation of a conversational commerce strategy.
4. Give yourself a competitive edge
Retail businesses are ramping up their e-commerce platforms to meet the growing demand for online shopping and remain profitable in the “new normal” caused by COVID-19.
As the e-commerce market expands, it’s more important than ever for merchants to differentiate themselves from the competition. Providing customers with real-time service in their preferred language can enhance the retailer’s customer experience and give it an edge over competitors.
Multilingual chat also provides cost savings.
For example, integrating a chatbot with automatic translation is significantly less expensive than expanding your customer support to include bilingual or multilingual agents. It also saves your existing customer service agents time by automating the translation process, giving them more power to deal with important customer queries.
Last but not least, multilingual chatbots like Heyday are scaling. If your brand has global expansion plans on the horizon, serving customers in their native language is a must. Every new retail location that has a dedicated website domain, Google My Business (GMB) or Facebook page can easily be integrated with our conversational AI platform.
A chatbot on the Dynamite website shows options for black trousers in French.
Multilingual chat is the basis of conversational commerce
Heyday is one of the few AI chatbots that offers a built-in multilingual feature that allows you and your team to not only take advantage of our automated chat, but do so in a localized, customer-facing way.
Heyday chatbot technology powered by state-of-the-art AI machine translation offers language support for English and French across all channels (including Facebook, Google and Whatsapp), integrates with popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Salesforce and Magento, and can detect your customer’s language preferences and adapt to them in real time.
(For a complete list of channels and e-commerce platforms we integrate with, see our Integrations Directory).
Several Heyday customers, including DAVIDsTEA, DECATHLON, and quirky French cosmetics company Merci Handy, are already taking advantage of our multilingual chat, using it to facilitate communication with local customers and optimize online customer service as they increasingly focus on their e-commerce platforms.
Chat with shoppers in French and English and turn customer conversations into sales with Heyday, our custom AI chatbot for retailers.