In a February 2005 report on multicultural marketing, we highlighted the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) software  in improving the quality of interactions with multilingual clients and prospects. Last month, machine translation supplier Language Weaver and newly-minted translation management system (TMS) provider Sajan announced multilingual support for RightNow Technologies’ CRM solution at the latter’s 2009 Summit.

CRM software can do a lot to improve how well a company knows and treats its customers. At its simplest, it can automate responses to common queries, suggest responses to less usual ones, filter out spam, ask respondents about the appropriateness of the answer they receive, and route messages based on the skill set of individual customer service representatives. More evolved systems tailor interactions to individual or demographic preferences. Other evolving solutions identify the language of the message and provide a mechanism to answer in the language of the message. Here is where Language Weaver and Sajan enter the RightNow picture:

•  Language Weaver previewed its integration into the RightNow Agent Desktop through the TranslateNow button. This function allows call center representatives to get translations of support and user-generated content, thus removing the language obstacle from some customer interactions. The bigger news was the unveiling of Language Weaver’s TrustScore. According to CTO Daniel Marcu, the TrustScore indexes over 500 variables as it rates each translation on a scale of 1 to 5. The higher the number, the more useful the rendering in customer care and other scenarios. Driven by huge volumes of data, this score promises to enhance MT credibility — and provide far more useful information to business people than BLEU scores.
• Sajan announced that it was language-enabling customer service agents with on-demand desktop access to Sajan translation services. Routed through Sajan’s GCMS translation management system, the request leverages the call center’s translation memory and terminology.

The next step? RightNow needs to add an interpreter button for its agents and connect to a telephone interpreting (TI) provider, which then routes to a live agent speaking the caller’s language. That step would voice-enable its increasingly multilingual CRM offering. 

The integration of machine translation (MT), translation management systems (TMS), TI, and language services into CRM is one more step toward bringing language technology to solve mainstream business problems. We expect more such announcements as companies across industry sectors strive to improve customer care and information access for all constituencies, regardless of language.