Want to Improve CSAT Scores? Rethink Your Marketing and Support

Customer happiness, or at the very least satisfaction, is important for a number of reasons. For starters, it serves as an indicator of customer retention and also has the ability to reduce churn and negative referrals. Although there are several recommendations on how to make your customers’ experience and association with your brand a more positive one, demonstrating a clear effort to meet your customers at their preferred language through marketing and support has the opportunity to distinguish brands with exceptional customer service and improve global CSAT numbers.

Is Your Business North American-Centric?

If your business is U.S based or built on a culture of native English speakers, it can be easy to approach business with a North American-centric approach. While offering content or support in English exclusively can be an innocent decision, your business runs the risk of alienating a large portion of prospective and current customers.

Rethinking Target Audiences

For companies using an inbound approach, content marketing has become one of the most popular tactics for lead generation. Currently, 88% of B2B inbound marketers utilize content marketing to drive traffic to owned sites. Examining the same sample of marketers, research has found that 32% have a written strategy. Despite the fact that the vast majority of companies are pushing out content daily, 60% of companies don’t have a global marketing strategy in place (Kwintessential). For businesses looking to capitalize on underserved markets, a multilingual strategy is the best solution to amplify content by avoiding saturated markets.

The Importance of Globalized Support

In case you missed it, a few weeks back we discussed customer support and the significant impact it can have on a business’ success. While customer support has the ability to directly influence customer retention, it also possesses the ability to derail even the most successful products if not given proper attention. Although many companies, (80%), do feel that they offer superior support to customers, meeting customers at their native or preferred language is still lacking in the vast majority of corporate support practices (Help Scout).

For companies struggling to find the merit in allocating resources to improving its support infrastructure, the ROI gained from investing in a global support solution can increase customer retention numbers and long term profitability. On average, businesses who offered global support for multilingual customers increased their chances of turning those customers into recurring ones by 74% (CSA). Additionally, businesses who are able to increase their retention numbers by 5% have the potential to increase profits anywhere from 25% to 95% (Bain & Co.).

Considerations for US-Based Companies

As a translation provider, one of the biggest deterrents for our customers prior to investing in a global content or support solution is a business’ location. For companies conducting business exclusively within the U.S or North America, multilingual support or content seems non-essential.

For companies that derive sales primarily within the U.S., a North-American approach to content and customer support becomes even more common. While native English speakers comprise more than half (64%) of English speakers in the U.S, the rise of multilingual U.S citizens is without a doubt spiking.

• For 21% of Americans, English is not the primary language spoken at home (Washington Times).
• Although Bilingual, 25 million Americans rate their English speaking ability as less than “very well” (Washington Times).

With a widespread number of Americans speaking another language in addition to English, the percentage of this subset of the population is only increasing. Currently, the amount of children speaking a different language than English at home is at 43% in California, 36% in Texas and 32% in Nevada (Washington Times).

For global companies, the perception that English is widely spoken and comprehended by the vast majority of internet users can hold negative implications as well. While 52% of content offered on the web is presented in English, a mere 18% of web users identify with English as their mother tongue (Anecys).

Businesses looking to adapt to an increasingly global economy have the opportunity to increase both customer retention and global CSAT scores simultaneously. By examining your organization’s customer support and marketing initiatives, your brand can position itself ahead of companies catering to the language and location of a single market or customer.