Multilingual Customer Support: Methods and Best Practices
For most businesses today, multilingual support isn’t just nice to have; it’s an essential part of a thoughtful and robust customer service strategy.
Fortunately, offering high-quality multilingual service to your customers is easier now than ever before, no matter what language they speak.
In this guide, we’ll walk through what multilingual support actually means, why it’s important, and some of the popular and effective methods your team can use to make it happen, including artificial intelligence (AI) and more.
Whether you’re a scrappy startup, a small ecommerce brand, or an established enterprise, you’ll find practical tips and best practices to help you expand your language support efficiently.
What is multilingual customer support?
Multilingual customer support is the ability to serve and support your customers in multiple languages, ideally across different service channels (like email, live chat, phone, and your help center).
The level of language support you can provide is a spectrum, ranging from a fully native-language experience to one-off translations during individual customer interactions.
To deliver support across multiple languages, you can rely on human expertise, technology, or a mix of both. The right mix of these individual elements depends on your goals, scale, budget, and customer needs.
Why is offering multilingual support important?
If you’ve worked in customer support for any length of time, you know how hard it can be to clearly communicate with customers, even when you both speak the same language. If a customer is forced to use a language they don’t speak well, the process becomes even more difficult.
Clearer communication means faster resolution, which means happier customers and support teams alike.
If your company is scaling globally but you’re only offering customer support in English, you’re inherently making the support experience harder for a chunk of your user base. Even if you’re just based in the U.S., it’s worthwhile to remember that over 21% of U.S. households speak a language other than English while at home.
Connecting with customers in their preferred language doesn’t have to be complex or particularly costly — as you’ll see below — and it’s a meaningful way to develop trust and delight.
Methods for delivering multilingual customer support
There isn’t a “right way” to implement multilingual customer support that applies across every single company. Instead, the best implementation requires finding the right mix of methods — technology and humans — to fit the needs of your business and customer base.
Here’s how they work and which teams they tend to suit best.
Use AI for translations
Generative AI has been a game changer when it comes to providing multilingual customer support. AI is the fastest and most cost-effective way to scale your language offerings, especially for lean teams at startups or large teams with high volumes. Out of the box, AI translation can provide instant, 24/7 support for virtually every language on earth.
Here are two ways you can immediately begin using AI for translation:
Use a ticketing system that allows for real-time translation
Many support tools, including Help Scout, now offer AI translation services directly in-platform. This is a huge contrast to the costly third-party solutions many companies relied upon in the past.
With Help Scout, you can use AI Assist to instantly translate agent replies right inside the conversation editor. Not having to switch tabs or tools to translate your copy ensures that your conversations with customers flow naturally and that you’re not adding an additional layer of friction for your team.
Translate your help center content
Your help center is a huge part of providing always-available help for customers and for scaling your team efficiently. With AI, you can translate your entire knowledge base into your customer’s preferred language.
For instance, Help Scout enables you to translate your Docs content into other languages natively (or you can use one of several integrations). Plus, AI Answers, the platform’s chatbot, can automatically detect and respond in any language that your customer uses to ask their question.
AI translation might be a good fit if you:
Have high inbound volume but limited headcount.
Primarily offer asynchronous support (email, messaging).
Don’t have the budget to hire native speakers in every language your customers speak.
Hire multilingual support agents
If you know that a significant percentage of your customer base speaks a specific language, hiring native speakers is the approach that ensures the highest quality support.
Directly hiring agents that are native speakers ensures you have a team that can handle live chat, phone, or complex issues, all while matching the voice and tone of your organization. This can be especially important if you provide phone support or your team handles sensitive or highly technical issues where native-level fluency can help ease communications.
Of course, fluency with a language is only the first bar to pass when evaluating who to hire for a multilingual role. It’s also important to consider the cultural aspects of your audience. While someone from Spain has native fluency in Spanish, they might not have the best cultural context if you’re serving an audience largely based in Mexico.
Lastly, cost is also an important factor to consider. Although it will usually provide the best experience, hiring native speakers is the most expensive approach to supporting customers across multiple languages.
Multilingual agents might be a good fit if you:
Support high-touch or sensitive products.
Offer real-time channels like voice or chat.
Have a request volume large enough to justify dedicated language coverage.
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Outsource to a multilingual support partner
For teams that want human-level support without hiring in-house, working with a multilingual BPO (business process outsourcing) partner is a solid option. Working with a partner organization gets you access to trained agents across multiple time zones and languages, typically at a lower cost than building the same capability internally.
BPO teams are especially useful for companies with inconsistent volume across a large number of languages that still desire a human element to ensure that each reply, help doc, or interaction is clear and culturally inclusive. It can also be a great option for small to medium-sized businesses that don’t want to take on the complexity of building out a team in-house.
If you choose to outsource your multilingual support, make sure to do your research. Ask questions about their experience delivering support in the languages you need most, and request samples to make sure they meet your company’s standards.
Outsourcing might be a good fit if you:
Are expanding into new markets.
Need to launch multilingual support quickly.
Experience inconsistent volume across languages.
Recommended Reading
7 multilingual customer support best practices
While there are plenty of different ways to build out your multilingual support experience, there are some best practices that you should always keep in mind. Implement these tips to help ensure a great customer experience across every language your customers speak.
1. Build a multilingual-first culture, and write new content with translation in mind
When producing new content — whether for your help center or for saved replies — write it with the intention of translation. That means prioritizing clarity and using plain language. Avoid colloquialisms, idioms, or slang that might not work in other languages. Keep your sentences short and direct.
Bonus: These tips make it easy to translate your content, and they also make it easier for customers in your native language to consume your content, too!
2. Support your AI efforts with a human review step
AI-powered multilingual support is only one piece of a successful strategy, and it’s important to be aware of its shortcomings. AI translation currently delivers 70% to 85% accuracy, while human translators hit 95% to 100%, meaning AI works best in partnership with humans. (By our powers combined!)
AI can’t be fully trusted to catch nuance, tone, or cultural context the way a human can, and if you don’t have a native speaker on your team reviewing its replies, there might be major issues your team isn’t catching.
At a minimum, consider working with a contracted native language speaker to review long-form or evergreen content produced by AI (like the docs in your help center) for accuracy.
Pro tip: If you don’t have a native speaker on your support team, check in to see if there are employees within the broader company that may be able to give your content a quick review.
3. Work with multilingual agents to produce a language-neutral style guide
If you’re hiring multilingual teammates or have existing multilingual staff members, take steps to keep them closely involved with the creation of your team’s style guide; their knowledge is a precious resource!
They can sift for jargon or colloquialisms that don’t translate well and give feedback on clear communication best practices that can be used across your support team (and organization).
4. Establish cross-cultural communication guidelines
Different cultures and communities value different kinds of communication. Many countries have norms that favor directness in communication (like the U.S. and Germany) while others (like Japan) strongly favor politeness.
Take the time to engage with members of communities your team is working with to help develop a playbook for communicating across cultures. Plainly spell out best practices, nuances, and other important information in your style guide to ensure your team is being understood the way you intend!
5. Monitor and analyze your customers’ language trends
Your customers should help inform how you approach investing in multilingual support. Consider tracking which languages are most commonly used when customers reach out for help or having a place for customers to request their preferred language.
That data should paint a clearer picture of whether or not your customer base is expanding in a region enough that it is worthwhile to hire dedicated agents or engage with an outsourcer vs. sticking with an AI-first approach.
6. Focus your resources to best match your business needs
Make sure that you match the right multilingual support resource with your business’s needs. For instance, when hiring a multilingual agent, you should make sure their language reflects the needs of your customers today and the anticipated demand down the road.
Many teams use a hybrid model: core team members handle major markets (like English, Spanish, or German), while AI or outsourced agents help fill in the gaps. Some teams use language experts to augment the work of AI, allowing a single person to audit vast amounts of AI-generated help content or saved replies to ensure their accuracy, cultural context, and clarity.
7. Clearly communicate your availability, and adjust it to meet your audiences
Multilingual support often means providing support to customers distributed across the world. Because of this, it’s important to clearly articulate your availability. Customers value quick responses from customer support, but big differences between time zones can make this difficult.
If your customer base expands in a new region, consider adjusting your team’s availability to accommodate the change if you can. If that’s not possible, be sure to provide self-service options like a help center or a chatbot to help bridge the gap.
Pro tip: Consider communicating availability in your customers’ timezones vs. your own. For instance, the class times on Help Scout’s live classes page are dynamic, ensuring that no matter where you are, the class timing is clear.
Get started with multilingual support
Delivering multilingual customer support isn’t about checking a box as you grow; it’s about meeting your customers where they are.
The best implementations start with your customer data. Pick the methods that fit your team, channels, and scale, and treat multilingual support like a core part of your service strategy as you grow and evolve.
Whether you’re using the latest AI tools and features, directly hiring native-speaking agents, partnering with a BPO, or blending several of these methods, the goal stays the same: clear and helpful support in the languages your customers prefer.
Thomas Hils
Thomas is a 10+ year veteran of the customer support space at companies like Zapier, Coda, and CoinTracker. He’s the founder of CX consultancy Silience Group and Head of Support at Replo.
