As companies keep growing, the need to expand to overseas markets is very crucial, and there are more and more potential markets that can scale up your business. As expanding to new markets, among the activities that you need to do, offering international customer support is the most important factor to make your business succeed.
You may have great products, but your customer service in oversea markets is unhelpful, not understandable, or hard to get in touch with, your customers will hear about it and they will leave you. Therefore, great international service will make customers feel they are listened to and helped, thus improving their experience with your brand.
In this article, we will explain why international customer support is important, and 4 tips to expand your customer support. Let’s dive in immediately.
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What is overseas customer support?
Overseas customer support is when you have people who help customers with their questions or concerns, but they are located in a different country than your business.
For example, if your ecommerce store is based in the United States and you have customers from Europe, you might hire customer support representatives who are based in Europe to help those customers.
The benefit of having overseas customer support is that it can make it easier and more convenient for customers to get the help they need. If they can talk to someone in their own time zone who speaks their language, it can be much more comfortable for them than trying to communicate with someone who is far away and speaks a different language.
Of course, there can be challenges with overseas customer support as well. Communication can sometimes be more difficult due to language barriers or time zone differences, and it can be more difficult to ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to company policies and procedures.
Why is overseas customer support important?
Providing global customer support requires dedication and investment. If you’re wondering whether it’s worth the effort, take a look at the key benefits. below and explore why international customer service does matter.
Access larger market
New customers and new markets provide you with new opportunities to grow your business, but there are also many challenges if you don’t have a deep understanding of it. Luckily, with excellent customer service, you can communicate clearly, engage more with your customers and develop strong relationships with them.
Since customer service is considered a new and effective marketing method. It can help you to engage with customers more and more often and find more insights. Also, by providing great support for customers, no matter where they are, you can stand out from other businesses with limited support.
Improve global customer retention
Offering multilingual customer service is one of the most important jobs that you need to do to expand your business overseas. Not only does it suit any customers from any country, but overall it improves global customer retention and generates more revenue.
The statistic says that 29% of businesses lost customers because they do not offer multilingual support, and 70% of customers are loyal to businesses that provide support in their native language.
Increase your revenue
96% of customers say that a company’s service is the most important in their choice of loyalty. Besides, 83% of businesses think it’s important to give customers an enjoyable experience to grow revenue. Any business that provides great customer service often generates 5.7 times more revenue than a business that has poor customer service.
Customer service can help your companies learn from existing customers about their needs and desires. From that point, your sales team can easily close more sales.
Provide a consistent customer experience
No matter where customers live or what language they speak, they should be able to receive consistent support in their native language.
Consistency in customer experience contributes to building a strong and loyal brand image in every market. Also, it will improve your business in many ways, from building stronger customer relationships, and stronger communities to improving customer loyalty and generating more sales.
4 eCommerce customer support tips while going overseas
Respect cultural differences
Always remember that the new market is totally different from your old one. Developing a deep country awareness helps you remove the cultural barriers, build bridges to connect between you and new customers, and learn how to respect the difference. This also results in avoiding cultural conflict and misunderstanding
It can be effective to build and keep a set of cultural and language guidelines for your customer support team that offers quick tips for communicating with customers, no matter their language or cultural context. Being aware of cultural differences will ensure that customers feel listened to and supported
Use translation services
Providing international customer service cannot succeed without using translation services. Of course, there are many free tools such as Google translate which can help you to translate messages. However, these translators sometimes make your speeches sound weird.
On the other hand, Translation services enable your customer service worldwide. They provide you with the ability to communicate with overseas customers with the help of native speakers. These services range from cheap to really expensive. There is a list of some services that you may be interested in: TransPerfect, Lionbridge, Mars Translation, LanguageLine Solutions, and much more.
Use localization softwares
These tools help you and developers to translate, automate, optimize, and simplify software, its applications, media files, pdfs, images, and other content according to the local culture and visitors’ needs.
Localization softwares help you remove the language barriers when customers visit your website. Therefore, it can help you to reach a wider audience, improve the browser experience, and click-through rate, and boost your sales.
Like translation services, localization softwares also range from cheap to very expensive. We have listed a group of localization services that you may be interested in Bablic, Transifex, Smartling, Weglot, etc.
Improve internal process through private notes and assign the ticket
The information line between your teams and agents always needs to be clear and concise, especially when you are expanding to other markets. Overseas businesses need to catch up with the information about products and services or new updates in local businesses so that they can improve internal processes.
That’s when NestDesk comes in handy. NestDesk provides you with a private note so that you can leave specific tickets about the customer, the case’s situation, and information that is valuable for other agents. Besides, NestDesk also allows you to automatically assign tickets for agents, or they can assign themselves so that customers will receive help and support faster.
Drive your global success with customer support
Providing great international customer support is crucial in expanding overseas. It does not only help you get better insights from customers but also improves customer experience. Overall, it retains customers and generates more sales.
Besides, if you are looking for a solution to improve your internal customer support process, NestDesk can help you. From leaving private notes to assigning tickets for agents, NestDesk will make your customer support become great for overseas customers
