Scaling businesses don’t just gain a larger customer base; they enhance their potential for greater influence and positive impact. However, this increasingly global reach is not without its challenges; chief among them is crafting a customer experience (CX) that resonates in every corner of your diverse market.
Going global entails more than just offering round-the-clock, multilingual support. It demands a deep dive into the various cultures that define your customer base. An understanding and respect for the traditions, values, and social norms that steer each customer’s expectations and experiences is pivotal.
The complexities involved in a culture-driven CX strategy might feel daunting, especially when juggling numerous growth strategies. But digital natives and scale-ups like yours hold a unique advantage over traditional behemoths—agility. Your ability to adapt and pivot makes it easier to build a customer service experience that truly captivates on a multicultural level.
So, where do you start? Let’s find out!
Understanding (and listening to) your diverse customer base
Your customers are not just a cluster of data points but unique individuals with rich cultural narratives that shape their world. While geography offers an initial insight into a customer’s cultural vista, it’s never the whole picture. After all, a single location can be home to many cultures.
You must dive deep with comprehensive market research and customer data analysis to grasp these nuances. Everything from purchasing patterns to language preferences to social norms can offer invaluable insights.
Psychographic segmentation is another way to complement your research. While demographics sketch the broad outlines of your customer, psychographics adds the vibrant strokes of their lifestyle, interests, and motivations, helping you pinpoint where your brand seamlessly fits in. As cultural influences often shape this understanding, this type of segmentation delivers a well-rounded view of your customer’s world.
Gathering customer feedback and insights should become a continuous part of this process, allowing you to stay tuned to emerging trends, shifts in preferences, or any hiccups in your customer service experience. Traditional surveys and feedback forms lay the groundwork, but true active listening means throwing open the communication doors and encouraging a share-all approach. From rave reviews to constructive criticism, every piece of feedback is valuable insight. It’s crucial to strive for an open dialogue where your customers feel acknowledged and valued, creating a platform where cultural needs and expectations are understood and met.
Armed with this feedback, you can refine your approach, tweak your segmentation, and tailor your global customer service to better resonate with each cultural group. It can also alert you to cultural sensitivities or local regulations you might have overlooked. Keep in mind that cultures are not static; they evolve over time, so continual research and adjustment are necessary.
Embrace this continuous cycle of learning, listening, and improving. It’s your passport to agile CX delivery and customer satisfaction as your business scales up. It’s not just about providing service—it’s about creating connections. And these connections are what fuel growth in a diverse, ever-changing global marketplace.
Cultural sensitivity in CX strategy and recruitment
With a deep understanding of your customers’ unique cultural narratives, it’s time to weave these insights into every facet of your CX strategy.
So, what does culturally sensitive customer service look like? At its heart, it’s about recognizing the shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all service model, then adapting your approach to respect and honor cultural norms. For example, a seemingly harmless CX strategy in one country might end up being a faux pas or even breaking laws in another.
In this journey, learning and growth are paramount. Be it an induction program for new hires or a brush-up course for your seasoned CX team, cultural competence training must be a firm staple in your strategy. Arm your team with the necessary skills to effectively connect with customers from various cultural backgrounds while nurturing an inclusive workplace culture.
Above all, delivering standout global customer service is anchored by a diverse CX workforce. Your customer support team is your brand’s face (or voice); they’re the ones fostering connections, solving problems, and shaping experiences, so it sends a powerful message when they reflect the same cultural diversity as your customers.
This is more than just a diversity quota or ticking boxes for a corporate social responsibility report. It’s about gathering many perspectives, experiences, and skill sets that can enrich your customer service. A multicultural support team can understand and respect cultural differences, ensuring your customers always feel seen, heard, and valued.
At Webhelp, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts sit at the top of our “Think Human” identity, and we strive to create a meaningful, sustainable working environment for people from all walks of life. Over the years, this approach to diversity has helped us build stronger connections with customers since our game-changers see them, understand them, and value them for who they are—a message that resonates in every language and culture.
In 2022, we recruited 11% of our workforce through impact sourcing, a socially-responsible approach that promotes diverse hiring from within marginalized groups. By providing opportunities for those who might otherwise be excluded from the formal labor market, our new game-changers enriched our customer service with their variety of perspectives, experiences, and skill sets. Brands should accommodate all customers, regardless of their cultural background or ability to access CX, and impact sourcing is another way to achieve that.
To build these types of successful teams, a conscious and targeted recruitment strategy is key. Seek out talent from diverse backgrounds, languages, and cultures. Don’t limit your hiring process to the traditional model; remote work has opened up a world of possibilities, allowing you to recruit skilled individuals based anywhere.
Crucially, a commitment to cultural sensitivity in your CX strategy and recruitment practices is the turning point from a customer feeling like just another transaction to feeling genuinely understood and appreciated.
Harnessing technology for culturally aligned customer service
Technology has revolutionized how we approach customer service. In conjunction with a diverse support team, innovative tools like data analytics and consumer behavior models help decipher customer data, enabling you to fully grasp the diversity of your audience and adapt to their preferred communication channels.
Tech-enabled analysis of customers’ online behavior through WhatsApp, social media, or chat helps to further understand and segment your customers. It uncovers the cultural nuances of your customers’ use of your products or services and their journey with your brand, guiding your approach to meeting them in their preferred language and style.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also becoming a transformative force in this regard. AI-powered machine translation tools, like our Polyglot solution, pave the way for multilingual, multicultural customer service. They allow customers to make inquiries in their local language while agents respond in theirs. This system empowers our CX agents to service customers beyond their language proficiency while consistently delivering higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) results than native-speaking teams.
Machine translation is also an efficient way to scale support across communication channels for additional languages, especially when the contact volume increases during a new market entry.
Plus, with personal technology and global connectivity advancing at an incredible pace, skilled customer service agents are no longer limited to one geographical location. People can be recruited globally, working remotely, adding depth to your multicultural support team—a sharp contrast to the model of hiring within commuting distance of a traditional contact center.
For instance, our Webhelp Anywhere model is a flexible, scalable hybrid-cloud platform that brings together best-in-class technologies and tools across people engagement, customer management, and operational performance. It allows for a truly remote process of hiring, training, onboarding, and managing staff without needing local footprint or multilingual hubs with on-site teams, creating the possibility for cross-country or even cross-continental CX teams.
Building a multicultural customer support team augmented with cutting-edge technology is a journey, not a destination. It requires dedication, continual learning, and investment. Collaborating with a global BPO and customer experience provider like Webhelp can streamline this process. We specialize in integrating with digital native companies and scale-ups, offering advice on the best CX solutions for continuous, rapid international expansion.
And if you only take one thing away, remember that embracing a CX approach based on appreciation and respect for your global customers can lead to sustained growth in an ever-diversifying market.
To discover more about the Customer Journey Execution Gap, take a look at our campaign where you can follow this deep dive series and sign up to download free eBooks.
