There are over 1.3 billion English speakers around the world. That seems like a lot but you can put that into perspective when you learn that there are almost 8 billion people in the world.
If your business is going global but you’re just focused on English speakers, then you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. You need to have your marketing in multiple languages.
If you’re doing multilingual marketing, you also need multilingual customer support. In this article, we will discuss the importance of customer support in the most crucial languages outside of English.
The Importance of Customer Support for Businesses
Just imagine, you’re doing business in a new market. One of your products has a problem. Customers call in asking for support. Many of them cannot speak English, but your support is only available in English. What do you think will happen?
You’re going to lose customers.
Those dissatisfied customers will then scare away potential customers.
Your company’s reputation will take a hit.
In other words, you need to offer support in your customers’ language or your business will suffer.
FIGS and Why They Matter
The problem is you can’t offer customer support for all the languages. The next move which makes a lot of sense is to offer customer support in the most widely used languages. This is where FIGS come in.
FIGS stands for French, Italian, German, and Spanish. These are the four main languages in Europe outside of English.
Should Businesses Offer Customer Support in FIGS?
If your business is going global, then you need to have a strong presence in the European market. The continent is a major economic force in the world.
But the languages making up the FIGS are not just used in Europe. There are over 500 million Spanish speakers worldwide and many former colonies of France still use the French language.
If you really want to have an international presence, then you need to offer FIGS support.
FIGS is still the go-to set of languages for translators. They know that these languages will allow them to reach the most number of people.
French
There are over 275 million speakers of the French language around the world today making them the fifth most spoken language in the world.
France is also a very advanced economy that has an outsized influence in the world. French is widely spoken in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Italian
There are over 60 million people in the world that speak Italian as their first language and millions more speak it as a second language.
The Italian economy is also the third largest economy in Europe, which makes it an extremely attractive place for investment. This creates a large demand for Italian translation services. Foreign companies wanting to enter the Italian market will have to deal with English to Italian translation to help with their communications in the country. They can acquire in-house talents or they can outsource their language needs.
German
Germany is the fourth largest economy in the world. While German is not as widespread as English, the importance of the German economy makes its language a must-have for those offering multilingual customer support.
Offering German customer support makes sense for B2B companies that deal with German businesses.
Spanish
Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It is the language that is used in the most number of countries as the primary language. This means offering customer support in Spanish would allow a company to enter so many markets.
Spanish speakers in the United States, spend more time talking to customer support than non-Hispanics. This just points out a need for strong Spanish customer support if your business is based in the United States.
Spanish is also the most popular second language in the United States. That alone should be enough for you to consider building Spanish customer support for your business.
Building Your FIGS Customer Support
Effective customer support is necessary for customer retention and language is one of the keys to having effective customer support. Here are some tips that can be used for building a FIGS customer support.
Prepare Cultural Best Practices
Set up best practices on how you can communicate across cultures and countries. There should be clear guidelines on how to communicate clearly for each culture.
Make the Chatbot Multilingual
Automation is a very powerful tool today. Use automation by building a chatbot to reach out to your audience in the right language.
Get Professional Help
When you’re building a FIGS customer support, you should get professional help. For example, if you need English to Italian translation services, you should only rely on companies that have a proven track record.
French, Italian, German, and Spanish are the usual go-to languages for translators. Businessmen should also be aware of what you can get from these languages by offering customer support in them. It’s about time that you explore the possibilities of global expansion by using FIGS for your customer support.
