Not only is the movie Lost in Translation a cult favorite since 2003, it’s also a very real experience that retailers want to avoid when communicating with customers at all costs. This applies to face-to-face interactions, but also online, where brands are seeing their e-commerce business grow and customers are increasingly turning to support. Enter: multilingual chatbot.
Statistica reports that 52% of adults in the United States shopped more online in May 2020, with e-commerce revenues increasing by 44.5% year-over-year. “It’s almost 2030 overnight,” said Craig Miller, Shopify’s Chief Product Officer, in an interview with BNN Bloomberg. “Some of the things that we hope will be important in the coming years have basically become super important overnight.”
Merchants are now dealing with more website traffic than ever before and looking for ways to engage and better serve more and more online customers.
and there multilingual AI chatbots It helps merchants interact with customers online with personalized, contextually relevant chats in almost any language.
Let’s examine why it’s important to provide personalized customer experiences online for traders and how this can be achieved using multilingual AI chatbots.
The importance of a personalized customer experience
Today, the importance and benefits of prioritizing customer experience (CX) are clear: retailers have seen increases in direct sales and increased customer loyalty by providing customer-specific messaging and reach. From a consumer perspective, personalized experiences can decide whether to buy a product and how much to spend.
It is reported that 49% of customers make an instant purchase after receiving a more personalized online experience.
Of course, a personalized CX can mean many things. Retailers leverage customized email marketing as well as product recommendations and special offers to enhance the online customer experience. But there is a more fundamental aspect that comes into play in every customer interaction. You guessed it: language.
Break the language barrier
Language is a well-known barrier in both socializing and working life. Living in a bilingual city like Montreal is something we come across every day. You say “Bonjour”, someone responds with “hello” and it can be hard to know where to go from there.
In a retail environment, the need for multilingual service is vital to serve and comfort customers, whether face-to-face or online. Fortunately, with today’s translation technologies and AI-powered multilingual chatbots like Heyday, the language barriers a customer faces when shopping online are not insurmountable.
For example, if your brand operates in parts of North America and Europe, a multilingual chatbot allows customers to receive support in their preferred language, whether in Spain, Germany, Canada or elsewhere. It may seem obvious, but English is still the default for many global chatbot solutions, which can be limiting at best and alienating at worst.
While platforms such as Google Business Messages and Facebook Messenger create a direct connection between retailers and customers, contextually relevant chat in the customer’s preferred language is an important way for merchants to improve their connection with customers.
What is a multilingual chatbot?
A multilingual chatbot provides online shoppers with live chat and automated support in their preferred language. Multilingual chat features are a must for brands operating in multiple geographies or multilingual regions.
Brands can implement multilingual chat in several ways: They can create a separate chatbot for each language they support, use Google translate, or collaborate with an AI chatbot platform like Heyday with built-in multilingual features. Customers like DAVIDsTEA serve customers in both French and English using our chatbot; No translator needed!
Instead of building a new network chatbot for each region you sell to, using a single multilingual chatbot takes less time and is more scalable if you decide to expand into new markets. Multilingual chat is one of the foundations of an effective, scalable chat trading strategy.
4 benefits of using a multilingual chatbot
There are numerous reasons why you and your team should consider using a multilingual chatbot, especially if you have an existing or planned international footprint.
Beyond the core benefits of using AI-driven chat, including 24/7 customer service, centralized customer support management, and automated responses to order queries and FAQs, multilingual chat increases the scalability of your business and enhances the customer’s self-service shopping experience, and more. . To make things easier, we have divided the advantages of multilingual chatbots into four categories:
🤖 Customer engagement
📈 Sales potential
🤝 Customer loyalty
🏆 Competitive advantage
1. Increase customer engagement
If you don’t both speak the same language, how likely are you to be in a relationship with someone?
Exactly.
The same goes for brands and potential customers.
The number one benefit of switching to multilingual live chat is that it creates a better experience for your customer and increases engagement. Customers can get the information they need faster using their preferred communication language, resulting in a better shopping experience.
Think about it, if your customer sends a query in French and your chatbot responds in English, it shows the customer that he needs to compromise.
It’s not very customer oriented.
Eliminate any friction in your customer’s experience by starting by communicating on your customer’s terms and in their preferred language. It goes without saying that communicating with customers streamlines support and sales more effectively; This is an advantage for time-strapped shoppers and sales and support reps.
2. Increase sales potential
It’s no secret among retailers and marketing teams that a personalized touch helps to win and retain more customers. In fact, 80% of shoppers are more likely to shop 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 your customers’ questions in their native language, but also offering them relevant product recommendations.
72% of shoppers are more likely to buy if a product is presented to them in their native language.
Heyday’s AI chatbot automatically integrates with your inventory catalog and can help your customers find the product they’re looking for, as well as other items that might be of interest to them. use natural language understanding (NLU), our chatbot identifies the exact keywords customers are using in conversation and offers them the products or services you offer that are relevant to that keyword.
Example of Dynamite using a Heyday chatbot to show a customer a black blazer in English.
With a deep understanding of many languages, AI-powered e-commerce merchants can elevate the self-service capabilities of their online stores and make it easier for customers to quickly get what they want, whether it’s a product, service or support.
3. Increase customer loyalty
You and your team know that while attracting new customers is always a top priority, developing good relationships with your existing customers is just as important.
Multilingual chat can help increase customer loyalty by developing richer connections between customers, local stores and their support and sales representatives.
Take, for example, DECATHLON, a sporting goods retailer that uses Heyday around the world. DECATHLON has adapted its chatbot to each market they serve. Whether the customer is shopping in Singapore, the UK or anywhere in the world, DECATHLON’s chatbot communicates in the most appropriate language.
44% of consumers said they would become repeat buyers after having a personalized experience with a brand.
Conversing with your customers in the language of their choice naturally leads to clearer communication, which is the foundation of the conversation strategy, which is the key driver of effective communication.
4. Maintain your competitive advantage
Businesses across the retail spectrum are augmenting their e-commerce platforms to meet the growing demand for online shopping and stay profitable in the “new normal” triggered by COVID-19.
As the e-commerce landscape expands, it is more important than ever for merchants to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Providing real-time service to customers in their preferred language can strengthen a retailer’s customer experience and give them a competitive edge.
Offering multilingual chat also has cost-saving benefits.
For example, integrating a chatbot with automatic translation is much cheaper than expanding your customer support team to include bilingual or multilingual agents. It also saves your existing customer service representatives time by automating the translation process and gives them more opportunity to handle high-value customer inquiries.
Finally, multilingual chatbots like Heyday’s are built to scale. Serving customers in their native language is a must if your brand has global expansion plans on the horizon. Any new retail location with a designated website domain, Google My Business (GMB) or Facebook page can easily integrate with our speech-based AI platform.
Chatbot showing black pants options in French on Dynamite’s website.
Multilingual chat is the pillar of mutual trade
Heyday is one of the few AI chatbots to offer 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-centric way.
Heyday’s chatbot technology powered by cutting-edge AI machine translation offers English and French language support across all channels (including Facebook, Google, and Whatsapp), and integrates with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, and Magento. and can identify and adapt your customer’s language preference in real time.
(See our integration directory for a full list of channels and e-commerce platforms we integrate).
Many Heyday customers, including DAVIDsTEA, DECATHLON and the whimsical French cosmetics company Merci Handy, are already taking advantage of our multilingual chat to streamline communication with local customers and optimize their online customer experience while increasingly focusing on e-commerce platforms.
Interact with shoppers in French and English and turn customer conversations into sales with Heyday, our exclusive AI chatbot for retailers.
