Why Multilingual Support is not Optional in The Travel Industry

In today's global economy, where most businesses seek to gain international markets, bridging cultural and linguistic differences is not an option, but a necessity. However, there are some industries that need multilingual skills much more than others. Travel and tourism is one of them because they naturally cater to consumers from different cultural backgrounds. Most travel and tourism companies facilitate online bookings and have detailed self-help sections on their websites, but travelers may want to speak with a customer service representative for a variety of reasons. Travel is usually a big item and people want to make sure they understand everything before they make a purchase and get it right. Sometimes they are looking for more detail than is available on the website, sometimes they simply want to speak to a human representative! People usually like to talk to a representative before making changes online themselves. This is also due to strict policies regarding cancellations and changes in the travel space, which can result in heavy financial penalties.

When travelers book remotely online, they need reassurance that the site they're buying from is legitimate. They may be traveling to a foreign country and will understandably have a number of questions. To make sure they get the best possible experience, they want to talk to the agent about what they're buying, the specifics of the tour, the details of the activity or experience, the fare rules for the tickets, but that can't be achieved if your customer and your agent don't speak the same language . If your representative speaks English and the only language your customer speaks and understands well is Italian, you leave a huge scope for misunderstanding leading to further complications. Presenting information to the customer in their native language ensures that you are both on the same page and instills confidence in the customer that they will not regret their purchase.

Traveling is very logistically demanding and things can go wrong unpredictably and suddenly. A flight may be rebooked or hotels may be closed due to flooding. In such situations, when customers contact your customer support in a panic, the last thing they want is to have to explain to them in a language that is not their native language, even if they know English. Similarly, when they need to cancel or make changes due to a personal issue, they would much prefer to speak to someone who understands their native language. At a critical moment like this, you don't want your customer struggling with a communication gap and making the situation worse.

Translation tools cannot be the mainstay of multilingual support. No matter how good a translation tool is, it can at best produce a literal translation that is grammatically correct and that is also optimistic. The current technology available cannot yet imitate how a human being converses. Selling travel is not like selling just another product. You're convincing your customers to go somewhere, do something, and you're asking them to trust you to create the right experience. The way a native speaker can use the right tone of voice, emotion and context to paint a word picture of what you have to offer cannot be achieved with machine translated text, at least not with current technology.

Hiring and maintaining multilingual staff in a business can be costly, time-consuming and cumbersome. Using freelancers around the world has potential management and quality issues. Many of these problems can be solved by engaging an external call center that specializes in multilingual support. You shouldn't think of multilingual customer support service as a cost center, but as a profit center. After all, customer service is an essential part of the customer experience and, if done right, can be the key to winning new customers and keeping existing ones for life.

At LiveSalesman, we truly understand what it means to be an international business and connect with people in their native language. We have helped many of our clients on their global expansion journey to internationalize and localize their customer service and navigate the path to success. With the ability to deliver call center solutions in over 30 European and Asian languages, we are always excited to help businesses find new ways to dominate international markets. We currently offer call center support in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Italian to name a few. Connect with us and accelerate your international growth!