multilingual-support

Multilingual support: how to localize your knowledge base

“Like a living creature, an organization works best if it can rely on a nervous system that sends information immediately to the parts that need it.”

Bill Gates wrote these words some 20 years ago in his book “Business @ the Speed of Thought” and they still carry weight today.

As you may have guessed, the “digital nervous system” refers to the internal knowledge management system. By using it, companies can efficiently centralize their know-how and ensure information flows freely within their organization.

For companies that want to successfully enter new markets and get ahead of their competition, one of the best ways to do this is to look inwards, enhance knowledge distribution, and localize their support documentation and knowledge bases.

Multilingual support documentation can include different types of guidelines (e.g. tone of voice standards, saved replies, answer guides), FAQs, product details, instructions, procedures, policies, or help docs. When it is properly created, managed, updated, and localized, it enables you to create amazing customer experiences.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at the way you can use Lokalise to manage multilingual support documentation in your chosen customer support tool.

We’ll provide you with a brief overview of Salesforce Knowledge Articles, Intercom Articles, and Zendesk Guide, and explain how you can leverage the benefits of these tools by bridging the language gap with Lokalise.

    Multilingual support with Salesforce Knowledge Articles

    Salesforce Knowledge Articles are there to help your support agents, customers, and partners. You can create different documents that include relevant information about your product and services to ensure a timely and accurate response to customer queries or issues.

    For instance, if a customer reaches out to you to ask about the subscription model and the cancelation policy, you’re just a click away from checking the information and helping out. If they’re facing an issue and are expressing frustration, your support agents can reply in an appropriate tone of voice by consulting the documented procedures. You get the idea.

    The articles can also encourage a self-service model, meaning you can make the knowledge base publicly available and freely accessible to your customers.

    There are lots of cool things you can do with Salesforce Knowledge Articles, and to name but a few:

    • You can create article types to define different formats and structures, and control how certain support documents will appear in respective channels.
    • Article page layouts allow you to manage permissions and documentation visibility.
    • You can create workflow rules to streamline your knowledge management process.

    How the Lokalise Salesforce integration helps

    If you share our mindset, you will agree that it’s not enough to ensure your customer success and support teams have the right answers right at their fingertips; these answers should also be in the right language. You can achieve that with Lokalise.

    If you want to ensure multilingual support, Lokalise provides a straightforward way to implement Salesforce Knowledge Article translations. As a collaborative platform that brings all team members under a single roof, Lokalise can help you structure and streamline your translation and localization process. In addition, it gives you the flexibility to automate and customize your workflows for the best end results.

    Here’s how Lokalise Salesforce integration works:

    Connect Link Translate Export
    Salesforce Knowledge with Lokalise Knowledge Articles to a Lokalise project any new or updated content translated content back to Salesforce

    It’s important to mention that Lokalise has numerous built-in tools such as translation memories, machine translation, glossaries, and QA checks, which enable you to conveniently manage the entire localization project from a single workspace.

    Since support documentation is continuously improved and updated, it makes sense to develop a continuous localization process so that your content is always ready for release. With Lokalise’s rich array of features and more than 40 available integrations, you have everything you need to adopt continuous localization.

    Did you know?… Speaking your customers’ language can help you increase sales, build brand loyalty, get access to a wider market, and gain competitive advantage.

    Multilingual support with Intercom Articles

    If you’re planning to implement Intercom or you’re using it already, you’re probably familiar with Intercom Articles.

    The Articles are an add-on in Intercom, enabling you to deliver faster answers to your customers. It’s a self-service knowledge base, meaning your customers can browse answers independently and in a convenient manner. Consequently, your support teams get asked fewer questions and avoid repetitive ones.

    Intercom Articles also have built-in support bots (such as the Resolution Bot) that can suggest articles based on the question the customer asked in the chat – even when your support team is away.

    Here are some of the great things you can do with Intercom Articles:

    • Centralize vital knowledge about your product and services so that your customers can access the information they need in just a few clicks
    • Optimize your knowledge articles for different channels (website, mobile app, in-product messages)
    • Measure article performance, improve content quality, and fill in the gaps thanks to customer answer ratings and searches

    How the Lokalise Intercom Articles integration helps

    Localizing help documentation is often an afterthought because 1) it can take a lot of resources to do it properly, and 2) some companies make the mistake of thinking that everyone knows English, so they perceive localization as something that’s just “nice to have”.

    However, speaking your customers’ language matters. With the Lokalise Intercom Articles integration, you can translate your help center articles into different languages and keep all versions in proper sync while also optimizing your translation costs. You can import collections, sections, and articles, regardless of their status (i.e. whether they are public or internal).

    No need to resort to spreadsheets and going through endless back and forth. Now you can enjoy a faster launch, fewer errors, and increased efficiency.

    The integration involves an easy 4-step process:

    Connect Link Translate Export
    Lokalise to Intercom articles, sections, and collections in Intercom to a Lokalise project any new or updated content translated content back to Intercom

    As you can see, it’s quite simple. We wanted to provide a plug and play solution for you so that you can enjoy having more time on your hands while providing the best possible experience to your customers.

    You can translate your help articles with your internal team, freelancers, community, partner agencies, or larger LSPs within a single workspace.

    In addition, Lokalise has numerous features that allow you to be more efficient. For instance, you can use MT engines such as Google, DeepL, or translation memories. Built-in chat and productivity integrations such as Slack, Jira, email, and more, are there to keep everyone in the loop and minimize idle waiting time. Let’s not forget Automations that allow you make changes in your project automatically, based on changes in the monitored language.

    For a detailed explanation of how the integration works and how to set it up, take a look at our Intercom integration tutorial.

    Did you know?... Not only does multilingual support help you reach a global audience, but translating content into your audience’s preferred language can also lower your support costs.

    Multilingual support with Zendesk Guide

    Zendesk Guide is another great piece of knowledge base software that helps you organize your team’s know-how. It allows you to customize your help center so you can support both your service agents and your customers.

    With useful features such as content history and archived content, your support agents can have a nice overview of knowledge base evolution over time. The tool also offers great article lifecycle management which makes it easy for content managers to review, approve, and publish content.

    With Zendesk Guide, some of the things you can enjoy include the following:

    • AI-powered recommendations, such as the Answer Bot and Knowledge Capture App, make fine-tuning the customer experience strategy a lot easier.
    • You can create publishing workflows to ensure all information is accurate, and updated and published in a timely manner.
    • It’s possible to create a dedicated space for customers (i.e. the Customer Portal) where they themselves can contribute with their own knowledge.

    How the Lokalise Zendesk Guide integration helps

    Zendesk Guide helps you support both your agents, by helping them do their jobs more efficiently, and your customers by making it easy for them to solve issues and find the answers they’re looking for.

    Lokalise complements these efforts by enabling you to deliver languages faster and work in the best way possible. The entire localization process takes place within a single platform, so you don’t have to worry about chasing Excel files or messages across different channels.

    Lokalise offers many features and numerous integrations that benefit all members of the localization system, making it easier for the entire team to work together in a productive manner.

    With automated QA checks, translation memories with fuzzy matching and concordance search, translation suggestions, glossaries, and more – you can ensure higher translation quality for your support documentation.

    You guessed it – the integration is as easy as pie:

    Connect Link Translate Export
    Lokalise with Zendesk Guide sections, categories, and articles in Zendesk Guide to a Lokalise project any new or updated content translated content back to Zendesk Guide

    For a detailed explanation of how the integration works and how to set it up, take a look at our Zendesk Guide integration tutorial.

    Did you know?… If you’re looking for best practices, we have the answer. Combine multilingual self-service support with a knowledge base, and add real-time translations of inbound and outbound chat support messages. This allows you to cover all important touch points and create a consistent experience for your multilingual customers.

    Are you ready to provide the best multilingual support to your customers?

    According to Gartner, companies that commit to improving the delivery of contextual knowledge to their agents or customers can reduce their response time by 20% to 80% while also raising competence and satisfaction. With that in mind, providing multilingual support is a no-brainer.

    If you’re looking for a simple way to handle translating your support documentation, we invite you to try Lokalise. Better yet, book a call with one of our product specialists to explore the best ways to handle your localization project. Whether you use Salesforce, Intercom, Zendesk or some other tool, we’re more than happy to help out.

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