.svg)
What Is a Multilingual Chatbot?
Chatbots are fed with static rules (questions and possible answers) or learn through AI to interact with customers. Especially the latter are increasingly being used and are getting better at understanding questions and conducting meaningful, purposeful conversations. Multilingual chatbots also recognize the user's input language and deliver appropriate responses.
How Can Companies Use Multilingual Chatbots?
Wherever dialogues occur, AI chatbots can help break down cultural and linguistic barriers through localized communication. This gives users a genuine feeling of "being understood."
Here are some of the areas where multilingual chatbots can be deployed:
Customer Service
Queues are a thing of the past: Customers now expect that chatbots will help with all concerns in real-time and around the clock. When they do this individually in the desired language, it elevates personalization and customer satisfaction to a new level.
Sales and Marketing
Especially for internationally active organizations, individualized customer communication makes the difference. Those who know the interests of their contacts can create targeted user experiences, including on social media. Direct dialogue with those a brand wants to reach therefore has an immense advantage. In sales, for example, personal needs can be addressed directly.
A look at various industries shows how versatile chatbots can change communication:
E-Commerce
Those who provide personal support both before and after purchase in online retail turn one-time buyers into loyal customers. With guided selling, chatbots specifically address needs and requirements and provide suitable recommendations. (Want to learn more about Guided Selling? Then best read our article: "Guided Selling: Targeted consultation for the right product").
Online shops also increasingly rely on AI for post-purchase support: Chatbots can quickly and efficiently process international customer inquiries thanks to integration with customer databases and language training. Individual help with delivery status, returns, warranty and more can thus be answered ideally within seconds, at any time of day or night.
Healthcare
Inform, support, accompany: The use cases for AI bots in healthcare are versatile. Especially here, healthcare providers and patients often encounter language barriers. Chatbots that understand patients' concerns in their own language and support diagnosis and treatment save time, avoid misunderstandings, and can lead to faster treatment success.
Publishers
In their daily business with subscribers, publishers encounter recurring inquiries, such as address changes or subscription adjustments. By using multilingual AI chatbots, readers are offered convenient 24-hour service while simultaneously relieving the publishing staff.
Prospects can also be efficiently converted into readers by presenting them with suitable offers. Through targeted dialogues, questions can be answered and cost models explained. This removes barriers and increases the willingness to subscribe to a (trial) subscription.
These Are the Advantages of Multilingual AI Chatbots
Meeting Customers Where They Are
An outstanding Customer Experience (CX) has special importance in customer retention. Personalized customer communication is a major step in the right direction. Multilingualism in AI chatbots also ensures a wider reach. For example: Customers who – perhaps due to an existing language barrier – do not want to pick up the phone are well-advised with a multilingual chatbot in the truest sense of the word. A pleasant experience that sticks.
A Real Competitive Advantage
Anyone who wants a piece of the global trade pie will expand. Besides logistical challenges, it's important to localize the online shop, apps, marketing, and customer documents. An advantage – the icing on the global cake, so to speak – comes from multilingual AI chatbots for pre-purchase consultation or post-purchase service. They can be implemented cost-effectively and are relatively quick to deploy.
Intelligence Creates Efficiency
Communication without language barriers is naturally the direct path to the customer. Chatbots also learn quickly and can be trained in new languages relatively easily when expanding into new markets. Or they already come with language capabilities built-in.
Multilingual Chatbots: What's the Catch?
Only when the quality of a chatbot's answers and dialogues is right does the user experience benefit. And only a well-trained bot does a good job. AI bots learn languages and their most natural application partly or fully with the help of increasingly better models. Here lurk pitfalls that can negatively influence the result:
- Potential colloquial peculiarities may not be recognized.
- The bot's way of addressing users ("Sie" vs. "Du" in German) may not match the brand.
- Linguistic nuances are still not observed with 100% accuracy even by very good translation machines.
A language is much more complex than just mastering vocabulary. For professionally localized customer communication, providers and tools that have already thought through all these aspects are therefore helpful. moinAI, for example, masters 98 languages, so it's already well-positioned multilingually.
Opportunities and Risks at a Glance
What to Look for in Multilingual Chatbots?
When searching for the right tool, it helps to check the following criteria.
Here's our checklist with all important factors at a glance:
- User Experience: Does the tool offer a user interface that is easy and intuitive to use, for example in the app or on the website?
- Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI): Chatbots that work with GenAI models learn over time to play back content in human quality. Especially in customer dialogue in different languages, they offer a decisive advantage.
- Product consultation: A good AI chatbot is able to process complex, multilingual product databases. And it turns this into personalized, error-free, and satisfying advice.
- User insights: A key function and absolute must is insight into user data. What questions were asked, which products were particularly frequently requested, and which inquiries were not satisfactory? Only with a meaningful data basis can analysis and optimization be initiated.
- Interfaces (APIs) and integrations: It makes sense to opt for a tool that has technical interfaces to applications already in use. This makes integration immensely simpler and thus cheaper. In addition, existing data and processes can be linked more easily.
- Analysis capabilities: The functional scope of a multilingual AI bot should definitely include analytics functions. User data and user behavior are of interest, for example, which can also be evaluated and measured separately by language and/or country. This is easily possible, for example, if the AI chatbot offers a separate channel per language that can be evaluated separately, as with moinAI.
- Costs: A close look at the possible models is worthwhile here. While costs for integration and a monthly base amount are standard, some providers charge additional variable costs that grow with increasing use of the bot. While this may sound like an advantage for smaller websites with less traffic, well-used bots quickly become expensive. Providers with a flat rate are usually the better choice here. Any costs per integrated language should also be considered from the outset with existing or planned internationalization.
Most European languages are mastered by chatbots today. They are getting better and better at delivering an authentic user experience to customers in their home countries or languages.
How Do Multilingual AI Chatbots Work in Practice?
An example from multilingual Switzerland shows the difference a multilingually trained chatbot can make. Teleboy is one of Switzerland's leading telecommunications providers with 400,000 users monthly. Accordingly, countless service requests in French, Italian, German, and English arrive daily. After implementing the multilingual moinAI AI chatbot in 2023, around 71% of inquiries in chat can now be answered automatically. Customers have a contact person around the clock, the Teleboy support team is measurably relieved, and the service quality is simultaneously improved.
Examples in the field of medicine and healthcare, such as Unilabs, also show the contribution a multilingual chatbot can make. Unilabs is one of Europe's leading diagnostics providers and helps people worldwide fight their health problems daily. In Switzerland and the Netherlands, Unilabs was able to greatly relieve its own support team with moinAI's multilingual solution by having an intelligent chatbot converse with patients in the respective national languages (German, Italian, French, and Dutch) and answer recurring questions in a standardized way. The positive effect thus works in both directions: The help-seeker is quickly assisted, and Unilabs' staff has more free resources for other tasks.
Conclusion on Multilingual Chatbots
Localization is a key factor in our converging world. Multilingual AI chatbots are an efficient and important engine here to simplify communication with customers, patients, and other target groups. Nevertheless, like humans, an AI chatbot must first learn a language and master its nuances to apply it flawlessly. This includes not only vocabulary but cultural peculiarities, dialects, manners, and so on. Multilingualism is not as simple as it sounds. The good news: With the right tool, it can succeed.
