Bridging the Intercultural Gap in Customer Communication

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In just a few decades, our world has come to rely more heavily on global trade and the shared marketplace that exists on the internet. In such a powerful community space, e-commerce businesses require the insight and the care to improve their offerings for a diverse customer base. This means bridging the intercultural gap in customer communication.

Though humans the world over have a lot in common, it is still important to understand where differences occur and consider these important distinctions when creating virtual storefronts. Doing so brings inclusivity and accessibility to your content.

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has reasserted the importance of seamless global communication in online business by increasing our reliance on the web.

To bridge your own communication problems when dealing with a variety of cultures, you must first understand why cultural awareness is essential, then apply these best practices for greater inclusivity.

Why Cultural Awareness is Essential in Customer Communication

The internet has made the world feel much smaller than it actually is. Around our planet, thousands of distinct cultures interact with one another to create vibrant marketplaces of products, services, and ideas.

We are lucky enough to live and work in such a world in which we can engage with others with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

The internet has made experiencing this diversity easier than ever. Now, people from all over the world interact on a singular marketplace for goods and services, where products from one side of the globe can be purchased from another.

For the businesses that rely on the internet to generate traffic, leads, and sales, you can expect diverse clientele who will have different standards of communication and different needs to consider.

This is the basis of intercultural communication, which is the process of coordinating with others of different backgrounds to produce mutually successful outcomes. In business, the importance of intercultural communication cannot be understated.

Here are just a few of the many business processes that depend on intercultural communication:

  • Forming diverse and non-discriminatory hiring practices
  • Building effective client relationships
  • Working successfully with a team

In customer communication especially, cultural awareness defines business success. Without it, you stand to miss out on the nuances of language and customer behaviors.

This can result in some problematic and even legally damaging consequences, reverberating into the reputation and revenues of your online business model.

To break through the communication gaps that exist too often between cultures, responsible online businesses must be prepared with understanding and open-mindedness.

How to Bridge Intercultural Gaps with Best Practices

Fortunately, navigating intercultural differences doesn’t have to be a marketing minefield. Instead, e-commerce businesses can apply a series of best practices to help them resolve communication gaps and conflicts.

From building internal cultures of empathy to opening up business processes to helpful feedback, there is a range of useful strategies that can make global communication more effective.

Here are some of the strategies you should consider:

1. Build a culture of empathy.

All successful communication entails practicing empathy. Empathy is the act of putting yourself in another’s position to better understand their situation, their challenges, and their needs. Without it, we would struggle to ever have successful relationships in business and in our private lives.

Empathy can also be applied to help smooth gaps in customer communication. For example, language barriers, ethnocentrism, and assumed similarities can all get in the way of creating an inclusive customer experience.

With empathy, customer support teams put themselves in the customer’s place and explore these issues from their perspective. As a result, they can better perceive how a customer might appreciate being addressed.

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The practice of empathy can go a long way towards customer success, even if it takes longer. Studies have shown that in the COVID-era, customers expect a heightened level of empathy and responsiveness more than anything else.

By building these traits into the culture of your own business, you can be better prepared to engage with audiences everywhere.

2. Engage in cultural sensitivity training.

But practicing empathy can be difficult if you don’t have a framework of understanding on which to base your efforts. This is where cultural sensitivity training comes in.

Cultural sensitivity training consists of training modules and programs designed to improve employee awareness of cultural differences and diverse experiences. It can be conducted in-house with the help of HR staff or through a third party.

Nowadays, this training can even take place over mobile applications and in Learning Management Systems (LMS) to improve the ways workers can access and complete their learning.

Sensitivity training is vital when it comes to broadening the worldview of a team. Your online company, for instance, might only consist of a few employees, likely with similar backgrounds based on geography or connected social networks.

Cultural awareness training can provide opportunities to explore other perspectives and break away from cultural tunnel vision long enough to perceive how customer-focused messaging can be improved for inclusivity.

3. Understand the layers and dimensions of culture.

Often built into cultural awareness training models are the layers and dimensions of culture to keep in mind.

These can be complex and we often take them for granted in our own cultures, but the series of interlocking systems of communication and identity are important to understand when dealing with a diverse customer base.

Intercultural communication for global industry requires exploring the orientations of cultural differences. There are 10 useful dimensions for thinking about these differences. These are:

  1. Environmental conditions and interactions
  2. Time management and value
  3. Actions and interactions
  4. Individual expression
  5. Use and observance of space
  6. Power relationships
  7. Individual identities
  8. Competitiveness
  9. Decision structures
  10. Thought processes

While mapping out each of these dimensions for every customer you interact with would be impossible, it helps to craft a series of useful customer profiles that will help you understand actionable differences when dealing with different cultures.

To craft these profiles, you’ll need the help of data and analytics.

4. Make effective use of business analytics.

Data is prevalent on the web and its use cases are without number. Fortunately, online businesses can make effective use of this data when it comes to building inclusive customer communication practices.

The process starts with data gathering. This can be done through any of the analytical tools you likely already use, from Google Analytics to social media insights. From there, you need to apply business analytics to derive knowledge that can improve your ability to make business decisions.

Doing so streamlines a business’s ability to save money and maximize its effectiveness in virtually all areas. This is especially true of customer communication.

With analysis-driven customer profiles, you can build toolkits for understanding and communicating with different cultural demographics more effectively.

For instance, in Eastern cultures, individuals typically expect more information and context before an attempt at selling or upselling a product is made. These points made clear in properly analyzed demographic profiles can help streamline customer communication.

5. Craft plain-language content.

Additionally, the use of plain language is a constant when it comes to smoothing intercultural communication gaps. When dealing with international business online, translation programs will likely be used.

To make communication work on these often-finicky platforms, customer support staff have to be cautious of the verbiage they employ.

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Plain language consists of words with limited meanings, short sentences, and reader-centered organization. This makes translation easier and simplifies the hard work of deciphering cultural expressions.

Image: simplifiedgroup.com

Idioms, for example, tend not to translate and thus should be avoided. If you’re trying to sell umbrellas for when it’s “raining cats and dogs,” readers from another country translating your marketing content might find themselves confused if not offended.

In fact, language carries connotations and biases in all its forms. Be aware of the words you choose and how they might reflect a certain worldview that others might not understand or agree with.

Crafting language-specific content for everything from marketing emails to payment systems can be a great way to avoid any problems while turning your business global.

6. Integrate local payment methods.

By making the sales process highly compatible with locales all over the world, you can best mitigate two of your most difficult barriers to international trade: language barriers and currency processing.

The right payment system will help make this process easy, automatically offering flexibility and opportunity to diverse countries.

Since currencies and trade practices are dimensions of cultural difference you need to address, your e-commerce platform should have the tools to offer inclusivity.

Everything from sales pages to the final receipt email should be logically translatable and reflect the customer’s situation. From there, the acceptance of local payment methods can help lower credit card decline rates while bridging intercultural trade.

Currency is just another component of communication, so open up your payment methods for a broader audience.

7. Open up to feedback and suggestions.

Last but not least, the effectiveness of your approach to intercultural communication will come down to how open you are to feedback and suggestions.

Often, it is difficult to gauge communication issues from our solitary perspectives. With the help of user feedback, you can better spot where your communication efforts are faltering.

Conduct polls, surveys, email outreach, and social media engagement to get a better sense of how you are doing in terms of intercultural communication.

Maybe your payment systems work great but certain words you use just don’t translate well in another language. Without the help of your users, these problems will be much harder to catch.

Building Inclusive, Responsive Services

All these strategies can help you bridge the communication gaps in your customer outreach processes that might be alienating your audience. Communication is tricky, and getting it right takes considering a host of factors and dimensions. When dealing with international cultures, the process can be even harder.

Fortunately, these tips can keep your e-commerce efforts focused on what matters: the customer experience. By applying empathy and open-mindedness to all your efforts, you’ll more effectively bridge these intercultural gaps, make sales, and improve customer satisfaction. Start by educating yourself on other worldviews and let your insights grow with customer feedback.

 

Dan Matthews
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