Dear Des Traynor, Please Integrate Intercom with Google Translate
I have used Intercom for the past two years to communicate with users in the same manner I use Slack to communicate with my teammates. It’s a wonderful product and I am sure many reading this would agree. However, there is a missing feature, which I was surprised to not find, nor see developed since becoming a customer of Intercom.
Two years ago, our startup had barely launched, but we have been lucky enough to grow our base above 20k users (90% of that in the last 3 months). As we grew, more and more users starting joining our service from foreign countries, especial Central and South America. My teammates and I were understandably pretty stoked when Brazil reached the #3 spot after the US and Canada (we are based in the latter).
Then the support questions started coming in through Intercom. I can honestly say it was incredible to experience both the volume of new requests and the delight in talking about our product with users from around the world.
Intercom’s ability to facilitate casual exchanges between companies and users is what makes it an amazing platform.The most magical experience I have had in intercom was communicating with a Brazilian user in chat for over an hour. We discussed our product and best practices for using it. As the conversation continued the tone became more casual and eventually we were exchanging jokes and gifs through Intercom.
It was fascinating to be communicating in such a personal way with someone so far away who was engaged with our product. However, with each note sent and received I had to copy and paste into Google Translate, then do the same in reverse before sending a message.
With this first magical interaction, it didn’t feel taxing to perform these simples tasks for each message. However, three months and literally hundreds of threads later, this back-and-forth translation process, which was once a source of delight, has become an incessant burden for our team. Foreign-language support responses are 3-4x more time-consuming than exchanges in English. This handicaps our ability to sustainably support foreign-language markets and limits our growth.
Surely there must be a better way that doesn’t require hiring a much larger and globally distributed support staff. The solution to this problem already exists. All that it requires is integration into your system.
Des, please integrate Google Translate with Intercom.
Cheers,
T.M.
& Ideas Are Free
