Multilingual Chatbots: Grow Your Business Globally

The current digital environment is conducive to innovations in the technical side of customer support and business operations. Chatbots have become an integral part of the digital customer support ecosystem and, WhatsApp is fast becoming the preferred mode of contact for more than half of the global online population. With businesses looking to adopt chatbots to improve customer service and provide a seamless customer experience in all parts of the world, building a multilingual chatbot that can understand questions in multiple languages is an attractive option for enterprises looking to grow their business globally. Not just that, multilingual chatbots also enable small businesses to reach out to their local audience by communicating with them in their native language.

What is a Multilingual chatbot?

A multilingual chatbot is a chatbot that can provide customer support through WhatsApp in multiple languages. Unlike traditional chatbots that were created for conversing in a single language, multilingual chatbots can provide information in your customers preferred language. Therefore, it eliminates the need for businesses to develop different chatbots for different languages. Moreover, a multilingual chatbot provides an easy, cost-effective, and time-saving way to expand businesses’ reach beyond their local markets and into new geographies.

Through the use of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), a multilingual chatbot can help your brand reach out to customers across the world by speaking their native languages. Today, with the rise in online and digital business, a multilingual chatbot can not only offer customer support in multiple languages but can also serve as a powerful force that increases brand reliability and customer experience.

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Going Global? Five reasons why multilingual chatbots improve your business

Multilingual chatbots provide superior benefits to companies that are looking to establish a global presence. It is estimated that more than two-thirds of the global population and 65% of the world’s consumers are bilingual. With that user base, a multilingual chatbot can help you increase your business and customer base exponentially. This is especially true for small and medium businesses. The following are some of the main reasons how multilingual chatbots can improve businesses in going global:

Cost-Effective

One of the main reasons why businesses are starting to adopt multilingual chatbots is the fact that it is cost-effective. Rather than spending resources on creating new chatbots for each region and each language, you can simply build one multilingual chatbot through the various language offerings of WhatsApp, and reach out to customers in different languages. This saves your team resources as they do not need to develop, launch, and manage different chatbots for each region and language. Moreover, multilingual chatbots provide a hassle-free customer support experience.

Improved Trust

One of the main reasons why you need to go global is to expand your customer base. Although companies are trying to get their name out to as many users as possible, not all of them will become loyal brand consumers. This is why businesses are looking to improve their trust factor. With a multilingual chatbot, your business will be able to answer a question in the user’s native language. The user will feel like he or she is speaking to a personal assistant who can offer the best customer experience for his/ her business.

Competitive Edge

With a multilingual conversational chatbot, your business will also be able to leverage the strengths of its local language in an effective manner. Unlike a local chatbot, which is limited to the language spoken in the user’s country, a multilingual chatbot can speak other languages. The chatbot will also be able to understand the language based on the context of the conversation and use the language that makes the most sense to communicate. This gives your brand a competitive edge as it provides customers with quality customer service across languages.

Increase Conversions

A multilingual chatbot can significantly increase the number of conversations your support/sales team can have with customers and this can ultimately translate into more conversions. Rather than managing multiple channels, with a multilingual chatbot, your team will have a single channel to provide help to customers. Thus, the chatbot will help your team save time as well as increase the time a customer spends on the website. Additionally, the chatbot will serve as a channel that allows your business to keep its customers engaged and interested in learning more about your brand.

Personalized Customer Experience

Customer experience is an important component of any business that is looking to expand its customer base. To ensure that you are able to provide a personalized customer experience, it is essential that you create great conversational experiences. Conversing in the native language will allow your chatbot to understand the language and adapt the conversation to be more personal. This will make the conversation more memorable and engaging. With a multilingual chatbot, your customers will feel a sense of belonging and familiarity, which will help your brand gain a significant advantage.

Platforms to build your multilingual chatbot

In today’s digital ecosystem, a chatbot can be built on any platform depending on the number of channels that your company provides. However, there are certain popular platforms that are used extensively in chatbot development. These include Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Twitter & other channels. The popularity of these platforms are evident in the fact that some companies have already developed their chatbot using these platforms. These platforms have easy-to-use conversational features and are scalable. Moreover, they are integrated and accessible to customers across channels and platforms.

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Three reasons why WhatsApp is the quickest platform to build multilingual chatbots

The following are some of the reasons why WhatsApp is one of the quickest and most convenient platforms to build a multilingual chatbot:

Popularity

There is no denying the fact that WhatsApp has become one of the most popular platforms in the world. It is estimated that more than 1.5 billion people use WhatsApp every day. Thus, the number of people who are using the app is at an all-time high. Moreover, the platform is widely used globally across numerous regions and languages. This popularity means that you will be able to easily reach out to a vast number of people. This is particularly useful for businesses that want to target a global audience.

Scalability

With a multilingual chatbot, you can easily use the conversational features on WhatsApp and scale it to many languages. Once you have built your chatbot, you can launch it in different languages. With more users, your chatbot will be able to grow. Thus, your chatbot can be used to provide customer support in multiple languages, thereby increasing its global reach and ultimately growing your business. With an app like WhatsApp, you will be able to integrate the conversational features into your website without having to integrate your website with each chatbot.

Easy to Use Platform

One of the reasons why people use WhatsApp for communication is because of the simplicity and ease of use of the platform. WhatsApp doesn’t come with any extra apps or platforms that you need to install on your phone. WhatsApp only uses the SMS capabilities of your phone. The conversational features are easy to use and it is a seamless experience for customers. This is especially true for multilingual chatbots. Unlike other chatbot development platforms, using WhatsApp won’t require the use of different APIs.

Three things to ensure before taking your multilingual chatbot live

Now that you’ve understood the importance of having a multilingual chatbot, you would be looking to build one right? Unfortunately, a lot of businesses are unaware of the challenges that they will face in order to successfully launch their chatbot. Therefore, it is important that you get an understanding of three following things to remember before building your multilingual chatbot:

Create a Knowledge Base

Before you start building your multilingual chatbot, you need to develop a knowledge base that contains the various questions that your chatbot is going to answer and this will also be helpful in understanding your conversations with customers. You need to ensure that this knowledge base is created in such a way that you are able to easily expand and maintain it in the future.

Make It Conversational

Customers prefer chatbots that are conversational in nature. Therefore, it is important to build a conversational multilingual chatbot that is capable of understanding a customer’s query and responding to it in a natural way.  One of the most important aspects to consider in making a conversational chatbot is its language vocabulary. Make sure that the chatbot has a large vocabulary in order to give customers the best possible experience.

Understand Your Users

Your chatbot should be able to identify your customers’ preferences. This will help your chatbot to adapt its conversations to match your users’ expectations. However, before building your multilingual chatbot, it is important to ensure that your chatbot is able to identify the customers’ preferences and needs. By doing so, your chatbot will be able to provide a personalized customer experience that will help your business improve conversions.

In addition to these three things, your chatbot should also be designed in such a way that it provides the best experience to your customers. You will need to develop it in such a way that it is intuitive and easy to use. This will allow you to create a positive impact for your customers by giving them useful information. This is especially true for businesses that want to improve their customer service.

Build no-code multilingual chatbots with Gallabox

If you’re ready to take your business to the next level by increasing your reach and gaining a competitive advantage, it’s time to build your very own multilingual chatbot. You can make the process of building a multilingual chatbot a hassle-free one by partnering with a WhatsApp business partner like Gallabox. Gallabox provides an easy to use no-code chatbot builder for businesses to scale their sales and support efforts. You can create, design and launch a customized multilingual chatbot on WhatsApp without the help of a developer or designer.

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