How to Streamline Your Company’s Language Operations

When it comes to enterprise translation services, your business has a few options: You can outsource your translation process to professional translators — effective, sure, but costly and time-consuming. You can hire an in-house multilingual support team of native speakers — which is also effective, but possibly even costlier and more time-consuming, given the onboarding and training involved in integrating new hires into your existing organizational structure. You can do away with people altogether and use AI machine translation — fast, efficient, and cheap, since there are no labor costs involved. But AI without people can lack nuance and empathy.

The best translation solution is to combine the speed and cost-effectiveness of AI with the empathetic, reality-grounded knowledge of human intelligence — that is, to do translation with human-in-the-loop AI. With AI-driven, human-refined translation, your business saves both time and money. 

Here are three ways in which a trusted business translation service partner, powered by AI and translation memory and refined by careful post-editing, can help. 

Quickly expand your CS into more languages, without having to hire native speakers

For many businesses, international expansion into new markets and new languages is a primary goal — a path to more customers and brand visibility. In our 2021 survey of over 1,000 decision-makers at global mid-market and enterprise businesses, we learned that 59% were planning to increase their translation and/or localization budget, and that trend hasn’t changed. Global expansion still hinges on speaking the local language, both in corporate communications and when addressing customers.

At its core, Unbabel is a technology platform that eliminates language barriers and reduces the risk of miscommunications, so that businesses can thrive across cultures and geographies. Even when your business doesn’t have enough volume of global support tickets to justify the cost or time required to hire an in-house multilingual support team, our platform ensures you’re speaking to customers in their native language with accurate translation of emails and chats, but also business documents, marketing materials, FAQs and pricing, app and website translation, software localization, and more — something that two-thirds of customers want.

Thanks to human-guided AI machine translation, your business can use its existing internal resources to scale internationally, without having to recruit, train, and retain highly specialized multilingual support agents. Testing new markets can happen more quickly and easily, and customers can get served sooner before new full-time hires need to be made. Your current team — the true subject matter experts in your product — can handle the toughest support requests in real-time by integrating Unbabel into your existing workflows and systems, without a lot of change in project management.

With Unbabel, a retail business can test demand for new products in different international markets before needing to invest in opening new brick-and-mortar stores, and they can drive brand loyalty by providing a consistent customer experience (CX) in every language across digital channels. Tech, fintech, and gaming businesses can offer 24/7 support to users across the globe. Travel businesses — which inherently handle lots of non-English support tickets covering various time-sensitive, high-stakes queries — can provide a consistently high standard of support to every customer, no matter their language or location, with fast turnaround times. 

Optimize your customer service (CS) for every situation, in more languages

Travel and retail businesses know the cycles of the seasons. The peak summer travel season brings surges of support tickets from travelers making last-minute changes and cancellations, while for retailers and e-commerce sites, the shopping frenzies of Black Friday and the holidays send support volumes skyrocketing. For other types of businesses, unforeseen events can lead to sudden peaks in support demand, stressing organizational infrastructure.

If businesses aren’t able to cover predictable or unexpected peaks in support demand with the service that customers have come to expect, those customers will take their business elsewhere. Language services like Unbabel ensure that customers stick around by helping businesses scale high-quality CS and automate resolutions — while simultaneously boosting agent productivity.

In effect, Unbabel serves as a business’s backup help, able to cover spikes and surges in support demand or, on the flip side, absentees. Unbabel can also support customers who speak long-tail languages such as Vietnamese, Polish, and Japanese. These target languages are less frequently localized and therefore cost more to support.

With less hiring, less training, and more predictable shift patterns, businesses achieve operational efficiency that saves them time and money. 

Reduce the costs of existing CS operations

Some businesses already have well-established CS operations. Those businesses are often large, international, and innovators in their industry — maybe they invented an entire industry — but a central concern is often one shared by every business: Costs. How can your business significantly reduce the costs of your robust, time-honored CS outfit without blowing the whole thing up?

A trusted language service provider like Unbabel.

With us, global businesses can lower their hiring costs by recruiting for skills and experience, rather than for knowledge of specific languages. They can optimize resource allocation, hiring fewer full-time agents and working in smaller teams for more streamlined productivity. They can consolidate their global footprint with a cost-saving location strategy, building out support hubs in places without high costs of living. In short, they can do more for less money (and with fewer people).

Conclusion

Scalable, seamless, and fast, Unbabel’s platform empowers your business to provide high-quality translations to every customer. Whether your business is focused on expanding internationally, optimizing existing CS operations, or reducing costs, Unbabel will streamline your multilingual operations, all while offering you full control and transparency over quality assurance, the unmatched speed of AI, and the expertise of human translators and linguists. 

Want to test out how our language solution fits into your existing CS workflows? Start your free trial now.