Handling Customer Emails in Multiple Languages

Open one new market and your support rota becomes a language problem. Someone has to read Czech on a Tuesday, and when that person takes a holiday, the Czech queue stops. Most stores solve this by hiring, or by answering everyone in English and hoping.

Before you do either, settle four things.

Decide which language you answer in, per market, and write it down. Answering everyone in English is a legitimate choice and plenty of stores make it deliberately. Drifting into it because nobody was available is not the same decision, and customers can tell the difference.

Decide who reviews. This is the part that gets skipped. If a reply goes out in a language nobody on shift can read, you have automated the writing and removed the checking, which is the wrong half to remove. The workable arrangement is a draft in the customer language, shown to your operator in the language they actually work in.

Protect the facts. Order numbers, refund amounts, carrier names and dates should come from the store record, not from a translation of a sentence someone wrote earlier. Facts that travel through a language layer are facts that can arrive wrong.

Keep the tone per market. Formality is not universal. A German customer expects a different register from a Dutch one, and a signature that reads well in Polish can read oddly translated word for word.

The operator who approved that reply does not read Czech. They checked the order number and the refund amount, which is the part worth checking.

We wrote the longer version of this up as a page: customer support in 7 languages with one team. If you are comparing tools, Tidio includes multi-language on every tier including the free one, so it is a fair thing to weigh up: Sensbot vs Tidio.

See how the Email Assistant handles languages