Famous adman David Ogilvy once said, “If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think.”  By the same token, when serving a customer, whether via email or chat or FAQ, speaking the customer’s language builds invaluable trust.  For this reason, serving a global market requires equipping customer service teams with multilingual capabilities. Unfortunately, as you probably know, that’s much easier said than done. Hiring for every necessary language is a moving target, given there are now more than 6,900 distinct languages, and demand can spike unpredictably.  That fundamental challenge—scaling multilingual support—is why we built Unbabel, the AI-powered machine translation solution for customer service.  Many of our customers take advantage of Unbabel’s integration with platforms like Zendesk, Salesforce, and Intercom. These integrations enable them to provide agents and customers with a seamless experience, even when a translation is required.  That seamless experience has always been our goal, and at the heart of everything we do over here at Unbabel. In that spirit, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes building something new. Today’s the day we get to tell you about our brand-new Portal! Through the end of 2020, we’ll be rolling out the Unbabel Portal, a self-service interface on top of the Unbabel platform, that empowers teams to measure and maximize their translation capabilities. It’s all part of our vision to support the development of language operations in multilingual customer service.   Now that you know the “why,” let’s dive into how the Unbabel Portal works and what makes it cool.  From enabling multilingual customer service to empowering language operations In a nutshell, the Portal gives customer service teams an easy way to manage language operations and optimize customer experience over time. To be more specific, the Portal is an interface that enables users to view, configure, manage, and optimize translations for customer service.  Language operations is an emerging cross-disciplinary function that helps global businesses communicate with their customers and other stakeholders more effectively by scaling multilingual capabilities. Since its inception, Unbabel has provided global organizations a path to high-quality native-language support for customers around the world. The Portal now allows those organizations to have more control and visibility into their multilingual support operations.   Why does this matter? Well, improving a company’s language ops capabilities benefits both agents and customers. Existing Unbabel customers using the Portal have increased customer service agent productivity while reducing the notoriously high employee turnover in the field. For our customers, and their customer service agents, Unbabel is invisible—and that’s a good thing! And for their end customers, all they see is high-quality support in their native languages. The Unbabel Portal will give our customers a visual front-end to manage their language operations. But it’s more than that. The Portal is a full-service translation dashboard—offering unprecedented access to information that enables teams to configure, monitor, and optimize customer service operations. A new window into critical language operations data Data is a huge part of the Portal’s benefits. See, as much as we love words, numbers matter when it comes to optimizing CS operations. The introduction of Unbabel’s self-service Portal provides teams with access to language-related customer service metrics. This data allows them to fully realize the value of multilingual customer service. The Portal offers an always-on view into your company’s “Language Brain,” which includes real-time visualization of usage data by language and digital channel. Currently, organizations can use Unbabel to service customers in various hard-to-hire and expensive languages (as well as the more common ones). Being able to visualize this data by country, service line, channel, and more provides valuable insights that can empower leaders to make decisions. Unbabel’s customers will also be able to use the Portal to filter and find the data that matters to them, exactly when they need it.  Additionally, through the Portal, we’re bringing Unbabel users more visibility into the impact that translations have on the customer experience. High-quality multilingual support results in boosted KPIs, from customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) to first response times (FRT) and beyond. Understanding how native-quality translations at scale impact these key metrics will help CS leaders measure ROI and make more strategic decisions.  Wondering what’s in the Portal? Unbabel customers can access real-time data, including: With Unbabel’s Portal, customer service leaders gain full visibility into their multilingual operations, allowing them to monitor usage and quality autonomously. They will also be able to customize Unbabel to add new content types, languages, or integrations. Unleashing the magic of the Unbabel Portal Unbabel has the power to flip a language barrier into a business advantage. Our translation layer frees up agents’ time to focus on improving the KPIs that matter most to the bottom line. That’s always been true, but now the Portal makes it possible to immediately visualize the impact that multilingual customer service has on an organization and its end customers. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. We believe language operations teams will grow in prevalence as more business leaders begin to recognize the ROI of frictionless multilingual support. The Portal offers a clear window into the value of fostering a language operations function. Ultimately, the Unbabel Portal serves our goal – to help customer service teams do what they do best, better.  We can’t wait to see the new doors the Unbabel Portal will open for your organization.