How Are Multilingual Bots Changing The Way Brands Are Communicating With Their Customers?

Gaurav Singh . Jan 07, 2021

Out of the world's approximately 7.5 billion inhabitants, only 1.5 billion speak English - that's 20% of the Earth's population. Additionally, most of them aren’t native English speakers. From the 1.5 billion folks, only 360 million people have English as their first language.

And with businesses on the constant verge to expand and spread globally, language can act as a barrier but at the same time drive opportunities. As globalization is “the ability to move and communicate easily with others all over the world” - this can only be made possible if companies speak the local tongue and make customers in other regions feel comfortable.

Plus, with over 24 million eCommerce stores across the globe, having an online presence has become a requirement for every business. Thus, any site can be visited by anyone from anywhere. Of course, your site content cannot change and cater to every single region, so here’s what businesses are doing.

They’re inching towards implementing multilingual bots. With a multilingual chatbot, customers can converse in the language they’re familiar with. This in turn would enhance their customer experience, improve the CSAT score, and reduce the churn rate.

Implementing a chatbot would not only aid the multilingual factor but also help companies shift away from increased manpower, time, and cost that goes into training employees to speak in multiple languages. Hence, making chatbots the need of the hour as they are the easiest, fastest, and the most cost-effective solution to these globalization challenges.

A recent study conducted by Forrester in 2017 found that 57% of marketing firms were using chatbots then. When you look at 2020, we can see that chatbots around us are innovating.

Chatbots are diversifying into something customers want, business aim for i.e. going local and talking to consumers in any language that they want.

Another study analyzed 1.5 million Hinglish (Sentences with a mix of English and Hindi) tweets from a 1.9 million sample, which is 1% of all the tweets in 2018. While Twitter is an English dominant medium where the percentage of Hinglish used is anywhere between 1%-5%, mediums such as WhatsApp have a much higher rate of communicating in this language.

Moreover, sales, marketing, and communication teams across industries in India believe that chatbots should process ‘code-mixed’ languages. These languages typically include an English line with a Hindi word or two and vice-versa.

Here the idea is to keep English as a base language as it’s often the only language in which two people who speak a different Indian language would mutually understand the word for something, to an extent.

For people, Hinglish adds a sense of pride hinting that the individual is locally grounded because they can talk in Hindi and that they are modern due to their ability to converse in English.

So, since there’s heavy usage of macaronic sentences(sentences formed by mixing two or more languages), chatbots are being developed in regional dialects while keeping in mind the “mixed” sentences. Popular examples of these languages would be Hinglish, Franglish, etc.

One survey found that 69% of consumers prefer chatbots for quick communication with brands. This number shouldn’t be that alarming as people are now more than willing to use a dash of AI in their daily lives. And since chatbots fall under the self-service segment, the need for it arises now more than ever. Given how the number of chatbot users is increasing, chatbots are now very advanced and can understand store data, and converse in the language the customer is comfortable in.

If a chatbot is fluent in 6-7 common languages, that will still account for 3 billion+ people worldwide who would be able to talk to the bot in their native language. And that’s a huge win. With the number of customers increasing region-wise, the brand will now be able to set a strong base in the respective country and attract more customers.

Also, while communicating with customers, personalization is of utmost importance. A survey declared that 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences.

Customer experience can be personalized to vast extent-developing customer profiles, responding to their queries personally, and most importantly building a great self-service experience. With chatbots accelerating the self-service portal, in most cases, the ability to converse in the language preferred by the customer acts as a huge differentiator to measure a customer’s experience.

Communicating in the language of their choice leaves the customer content and deeply satisfied. Thus, going online or expanding globally requires a business to be able to connect with the customers regionally, and multilingual chatbots will help with the same and help drive a seamless transition.