9 Tips for Delivering Effective International Customer Service
When your primary paying customer market is outside of your own geographic or cultural home, you very quickly realize how much adaptation is needed to meet those customers’ needs.
Serving international customers while maintaining a high-quality, consistent experience takes some intentional effort, but it is a very attainable goal. The best part is that all the work you do to make your support experience effective in other countries and cultures will also improve your baseline support systems.
Follow the nine tips below to deliver effective international customer service and build a more solid, thoughtful support system that is flexible and maintainable.
1. Identify your international support needs
Unless things are going seriously well, you probably don’t have customers all over the planet yet. Before investing a lot of time and effort into your international customer service program, review your available data to determine which languages and regions are most important.
Sources of data to consider:
Customer billing addresses: Look for larger clusters or language groups outside your home country.
Support tickets: Note whenever customers explicitly request other languages but also when their domain name, company name, or IP address can be associated with a language or region.
Website analytics: Most tools will show you where your audience is coming from.
Use the data you collect to identify your top few international markets. That will help you prioritize all your other internationalization work, from languages offered to timezones covered to potential hiring needs.
2. Write for a global audience
Whether or not you offer support in more than one language, you can save yourself and your customers a lot of time and effort by writing in plain language to begin with.
Especially in your help documentation and your customer service replies, plain and clear language makes your meaning more accessible to everyone, but particularly to people for whom English could be a second or third language.
Former Help Scout support pro Amanda is a polyglot for whom English is a later addition to her skills. As she put it:
"The first time I saw ‘how to MacGyver’ something, I had no idea what it meant.”
You don’t have to be dry or boring, and you may still choose to use more casual and colloquial phrases from time to time, but if you aim for clear and direct prose as your default, you’re helping customers of all linguistic backgrounds as well as any machine ingesting those documents.
Whether you’re writing saved replies, knowledge base articles, direct support answers, or on-site copy, plain language is a gift to your readers.
3. Translate your most important knowledge base entries
For those customers who struggle with or don’t speak your primary language, documentation in their preferred language could make the difference between success and failure with your products and services.
When customers are able to self-serve in the language they are most skilled in, it’s a huge customer experience win, and it can make your business accessible to whole new audiences.
Use your help desk’s reporting tools to identify your most commonly read knowledge base articles, and combine that with your support team’s own judgement on the most critical information for customer success.
Translate those pages into the languages you identified back in tip number one above. If you have the budget, consider paying a native speaker to translate them. They can adapt to the nuances of your company voice and product details better than an automated tool will.
If you do translate your self-service documents, be sure to create an update process that will keep translated versions in sync with the original document.
4. Use translation tools where they are most helpful
As generative AI tools expand, machine translation is getting better and cheaper. Help Scout can translate your Docs content into other languages, for example, and various integrations allow for further translation processes. Your help desk of choice likely has similar functionality.
You may have multi-lingual people on your support team who can also help you review some of your automatically translated pages for accuracy and quality, which is time well spent.
Beyond pre-written answers and knowledge base documents, some chatbot tools like AI Answers can detect and respond in your customers’ own languages.
In any situation where a customer receives an auto-translated response (e.g., a chatbot responds to a question in Spanish based on English help docs or your team uses an AI assistant to translate their own reply), it’s always best to tell the customer that machine translation has occurred so they can read with that additional context in mind.
Recommended Reading
5. Develop your team’s cultural knowledge
The ability to use another language is not the same as the ability to communicate effectively, and fluent language use is different than cultural fluency.
Where your own culture might see a casual written tone as friendly and helpful, another might read it as dismissive or inappropriate. For instance, Jan Maas is not being rude; he’s just being Dutch. If your customer base crosses cultural borders, it is worth spending some time to educate your team. Search for “cross cultural awareness training” for some options near you.
As a general rule, it is helpful for customer support staff to mirror a customer’s own tone. Any given person is not perfectly reflective of their own culture’s norms, so matching the specific customer’s style is a good baseline approach…unless they are being abusive!
Help Scout alum Amanda has also helpfully provided 8 Tips for How to Approach Cross-Cultural Customer Support.
6. Quality check for international issues
Computers, and the forms they jealously protect with their validation scripts, are very literal. They (or the programmers who use them) don’t understand that some people’s names include accents, umlauts, apostrophes, or other marks, that some people only use one name, or that their names change. Read Patrick McKenzie’s classic article for more examples.
Name validation is just one of the many ways systems that work well for your local customers can fail when you start reaching across international borders. From character encoding issues to keyboard shortcut standards to currency formatting, serving customers in other places is technically trickier.
When you are testing for quality control or trying to replicate reported customer issues, make sure your team is aware of potential internationalization concerns. Check your sign up forms, your support forms, and your email flows especially. Having a customer who can’t even report an issue because your support flow is broken for them is a dire experience.
7. Build coverage for the time zones that matter most
Customer support hours can be tough even for customers within your own timezone. Getting away from their own jobs to ask for help can be a big ask, so if you have customers who spend most of their days outside of your typical business hours, your support function needs to offer them some way to get help. Your help desk reporting should be able to show you when support requests tend to arrive, and that should inform your staffing (whether human or AI-driven).
Depending on your scale, budget, and customer locations, you might consider staggered start times so that you have coverage before and/or after business hours. A follow-the-sun model of support may be an option, too, by either hiring employees in global timezones or using a BPO or other outsourced support service to bolster your coverage.
Whichever option you choose, job number one is to make sure customers understand what to expect. Tell them when you have support staff available so they can plan their own lives accordingly.
For more help, see 3 Strategies for Scaling Up to 24-Hour Customer Service.
8. Localize your international customer service
We’ve already covered cultural knowledge and translation as key factors in localizing your service, but localizing goes beyond the direct word choice.
Depending on your products and services, you may also need to consider localizing your units of measurement, currencies, and date formats. (Personal note: dd/mm/yyyy very clearly makes the most sense, and I will not be responding to correspondence on this issue.)
There may also be local legal and cultural issues to be aware of. Are there constraints on which information can be saved inside your help desk? Do you need a system for removing customer data? Are there local holidays which might impact your need for support coverage?
9. Break down your reporting by region and language
Depending on your help desk software, you may be able to use custom fields or tags to view your support quality reporting by language or region.
High-quality service to your primary local audience may otherwise be masking a lower-quality service experience for your international customers.
Until you can show that it is happening, it will be difficult to prioritize the time and effort required to fix those issues. Even before you have put specific reporting in place, your team will be aware of international customer requests, and you can solicit feedback from them.
Start by letting your team know that you care about international service quality so they pay attention to the signals already available to you.
Serve your customers well, wherever they are
Our planet is covered with potential customers (excluding perhaps Antarctica and the empty middle parts of Australia). You’ve already built out your products and services, and some of those people would love to pay you for them. Why not put in some time and effort to create a support experience that will keep them coming back and turn them into advocates for your business?
Mathew Patterson
After running a support team for years, Mat joined Help Scout, where he helps people deliver better online customer support. Subscribe to The Supportive Newsletter or find him on LinkedIn.
