The Beginner’s Guide to Running a Multilingual Help Desk

by

Do not let the “beginner” keyword of the title fool you, as after you finish reading the following guide, you will be well-equipped with all the ingredients to quickly and effortlessly venture on setting up a multilingual help desk and, most importantly, connect with your customers all around the globe.

When it comes to opening access to your support content on a global scale, having localised content should be a strategic priority. Let’s say you have a product or service that is available in 3 continents and you need your email and chat automated responses to adapt to the language differences, but you only offer, for example, English. Sounds like a barrier to exceptional global, and borderless support, doesn’t it?

Zendesk’s dynamic content feature can help ensure a seamless, 360-degree experience, both for your agents and your customers, despite their location and primary language. There are three types of content that you can translate within Zendesk.

First and foremost, ticket responses. Let’s assume that you just received a ticket in which the user is asking you for directions as to how to check his account credit balance, And now let’s assume that the user wrote the message in Spanish. As the Zendesk Help Centre admin, you would only need to create a dynamic content entry into the system once, then simply create translations for the other supported languages, all done within the known and easy-to-use Zendesk user interface. A placeholder is then generated, which can be used throughout your instance, from macros to triggers. You no longer need to worry about choosing the correct translation, as all the rest is being done by the system’s exceptional language recognition abilities!

Dynamic content can also be used in your defined fields that your users need to fill when they are submitting a ticket, thus being able to further help your users navigate through your support centre. However, such functionality is not limited to just text. Dynamic content placeholders can also be used for showing different styling or branding, based on the user locale. With code, you can manipulate visuals and images, allowing you to adapt your content and localise accordingly.

The translated and localised placeholders can further be adapted to your email templates, giving you the power to adapt components like titles and signatures, personalising according to culture and language and allowing you to reach your whole user base, regardless of their location and primary language.

But the power of localisation doesn’t stop there! Zendesk Guide, the system which manages and organises your knowledge base in articles, categories and sections, can also be translated and localised accordingly. Once you enable the languages of your choice in the friendly administration interface, every article gives you the option to translate it in any of the new languages you just enabled, without you worrying about having to handle different articles for every language, leaving the system to handle the heavy weight-lifting of showing the correct language to the user, and you focus on what matters most: your content.

If you need help with setting up a multilingual, localised help centre or would like to learn more about the Zendesk product family, contact us today! Our team of experts can help you localise your customer support platform in no time.

If you would like to learn more about how you can provide support in multiple languages, join us for a webinar on Wednesday, 27th February 2019 at 3:00 p.m. CET. Click here to save your seat!