Want the best translation software for customer support departments? Before you settle on a platform, there several things you must know.

First, it’s important to define exactly what you want the software to help your team with.

Here are examples of questions you should ask yourself:

• Do you need to translate Help Center / Help Desk content that exists in your content management system (CMS)? 
• Are you looking to store and reuse translations that are happening in real time within your customer support application (e.g. ZenDesk)? 
• Would it be helpful to have a team project management space where the latest version of all of your translated customer service queries and answers are kept in one place?
• Are you looking to build a multilingual chat bot?

Even if you’re not 100% certain about what you need, we’ll guide you.

We won’t start by naming the best translation software for customer service departments, because that depends on your company’s specific needs.

On the contrary, we’ll first present you with the most commonly helpful features for multilingual customer support, and then we will make a recommendation for the top translation software for customer support teams at the end of this article. And it contains all of the following features.

Top Translation Software Capabilities for Customer Service Teams

Before we dive into the features of the best translation software for customer support, we need to discuss what success means to most support teams.

Customer satisfaction and success is most likely central to your mission. But when it comes down to it, the real measure of how effective your team is depends on how fast they close a ticket while truly satisfying your customer.

So let’s start with one question central to discussions about your team’s success, and we’ll tell you how this relates to translation quality and what facilitates that.

What helps your customer support agents reduce the average time it takes to close a ticket?

1. Understanding the core issue more quickly
2. Response time
3. Response quality
4. Resolution of the actual issue

How about all of the above?

As it is, these facets of customer support communication are already pertinent to success when it comes to native-speaking customers. Apply layer of internationalization to your customer support messaging, and it becomes more complex.

Instead of using the best translation software for customer support, you might be using built-in translation functionality that comes standard with your existing customer support application. However, it’s important to note those are typically based on raw machine translation. 

Why Does This Matter?

You’re at risk of using a translation that doesn’t make any real sense, seems robotic, cold or downright offensive to your customer. Depending on your product or industry, it can even be dangerous. Especially for translations involving technical or scientific terminology, abstract engineering concepts and industry jargon.

It’s the same thing as plugging the translation into Google Translate. There are plenty of horror stories of brands relying 100% on automated translation. 

That being said, below are the capabilities included in the best customer support translation software.

Generate First Draft Translations in Seconds and Minutes

Typically, a human translator can only translate 2,500 words in 8 hours. It’s slow and expensive, making human translation a less-than-perfect solution. Therefore, if you value efficiency, you’ll need to use machine translation to translate your help center information and help generate multilingual chat and bot responses.

But machine translation alone is not perfect or near the human level. It still requires a human to edit the translation.

Store and Reuse Previous Translations

The best translation software for customer support will allow a human translator to edit the machine translation and store the edited translation for future reuse. It will also allow a human improve the machine translation software by “training” it.

A good solution will allow you to dynamically improve the translation that the machine translation produces through a continuous cycle of editing translations. 

Review and Improve Translation Quality

Many companies use bilingual employees to translate common chat replies, help center content and multilingual chatbots. These personnel are looking for translation software that is easy to use and learn because they don’t have time to waste on complicated software. 

So you’ll want intuitive software with a modern user interface that puts powerful translation technologies; like Dynamic Machine Learning, machine translation and translation memory, at their fingertips without the complexity of a toolbar that looks like it’s straight out of Microsoft Word.

Improving the quality of your translations will help your support team understand the issues more quickly by:

1. Accurately translating the question
2. Replying in a way that solves the issue and makes sense to the customer

In the end, this helps a customer support specialist to resolve issues more quickly.

Sure, this requires input from a bilingual translator or customer support agent to improve the machine-generated translations, but imagine the cost-savings, time-savings and improved customer satisfaction ratings resulting from this new effort.

Saving these accurately-translated questions and answers for future use can help all of your support members with thousands of support tickets. Thankfully, you can do that with the best translation software for customer service, which contains Dynamic Machine Learning.

Dynamic Machine Learning

You’ve heard the hype about AI and machine learning. So how about pioneering the mission to incorporate it into your customer support department’s day-to-day? Saving time and money for the company certainly never reflected poorly on a manager. 

Translation software that includes Dynamic Machine Learning will do the following:

• Use Translation Memory to store your edited translations for future reuse
• Automatically replace repetitions of text segments upon editing just one instance of the segment (think: across canned responses, Help Center content, FAQ’s, manuals, etc.)
• Automatically update your already-published texts in real-time

Access to a Robust API

The best translation application for customer support will deliver these services and functionality via an API. A premium translation API will provide more functionality to your team than simply delivering raw machine translation or connecting you to an external translator.

All the above capabilities should be available via API calls.
Having access to a robust API means you give other software systems in use by your team (e.g. ZenDesk, FreshDesk, SalesForce for Service) more than just access to raw translations. You can deliver high-quality, human-edited translations and updated content to other programs in seconds and minutes, which will save your company time and money.

Live Human Tech Support

When you jump on a chat for help with your customer support translation system, it’s important that you’re able to access a human, not a bot. Make sure that any translation application you consider will give you live customer support.

Ultimately, this will save you time. When you speak to a live agent, you get quicker, higher-quality support when it comes to troubleshooting problematic files and onboarding users.

Security & Confidentiality

Last but not least, you don’t want to skimp on security. Your customer support translation software should not only provide two-step authentication, but it should also run your translations over a secure connection and use encrypted storage for your files. 

What’s more, your data should never be sold or shared with third parties. You should also be sure that your translation software is compliant with regulations such as GDPR and so on. The best way to make sure your company’s and customers’ data is protected is to make sure the translation software has undergone a third-party security audit.

Recommended Translation Software for Customer Service Departments

If you want the best translation software for customer service, keep in mind that using high-quality translation and productivity tools will improve your company’s quality of support and conserve your internal resources. All of the functionality mentioned above will result in continuous translation quality improvement, cost-savings and will reduce hours worked.

To experience this, consider Pairaphrase. 

Pairaphrase is a web-based translation management system for enterprises, and it includes all the capabilities listed above, plus more.

Schedule a demo  today to learn more about integrating Pairaphrase with your customer support.