Travelling to a country where you don’t speak the local language can be overwhelming. For the more than 1.5 million tourists visiting Australia annually whose native language is not English, the language barrier can dramatically impact the quality of their holidays. The responsibility to ensure foreign visitors get the best experience in our country lies not just with government tourism bodies, but with businesses delivering goods and services throughout a tourist’s visit to a destination. This includes hotels, telecommunications companies, restaurants, and tour operators.
You don’t need to hire multilingual staff to be multilingual
Being able to communicate to non-English speaking customers don’t have to be a burden, and doesn’t need to involve a huge investment in foreign speaking staff. Multilingual customer chat services enable any English speaking customer support agent to talk to tourists in virtually any language. SMS-based Jeeves.Plus does this in 104 languages, and saves conversation histories on its online platform for easy reference and handovers to other agents.
The benefits of being able to communicate easily with foreign visitors range from increased sales, attracting repeat business, and word-of-mouth referrals to from tourists who’ve had an exceptional, seamless encounter with local businesses and destinations.
Beyond Instagrammable moments
Tourists have access to technology that basically eliminates the need for human interactions – think Google Maps, translation apps, and Instagram to get all the help and advice they need to enjoy their holiday. But what’s lacking from this are the human interactions. Being able to actually chat with other people ultimate makes a holiday truly memorable, beyond a series of photos for social media.
Being able to help tourists in their native language can be cheap, productive, and most importantly, help create a lasting impression on a visitor that can make or break a destination’s reputation.
David Hayes is the founder of Jeeves.Plus, a simple multilingual customer chat tool that lets tourism businesses talk to their customers through SMS on any device at any time.
