Multilingual customer support – how Unbabel works with MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal is a fast, easy to use calorie counter. Medical studies prove the best way to lose weight and keep it off is to keep a diary of the food you eat. Based on this the MyFitnessPal application was built to make calorie counting and food tracking easy. Millions of people have lost weight using the web and mobile apps, available in 15 languages! In 2015 the company was sold to Under Armour and is now part of its Connected Fitness division.

Improving customer support language coverage using the Unbabel API

The Challenge

For consumer oriented startups especially, translated and localized content is key. People are much more comfortable using products in their native language. Recognizing this MyFitnessPal localized it’s web and mobile app into 15 languages. But the customer support content lagged.

“Before investing time and resources in translating our Knowledge Center, we wanted to make sure we had a clear business case.”

Julie Monniot-Gaillis, Localization Coordinator

Knowledge Centers and Frequently Asked Questions often have a lot of content, hundreds of articles sum up to thousands of words. Translating it all into multiple languages without the right process can be not just expensive, cumbersome and time consuming. The manual work involved in exporting all the content, requesting the translation and re-publishing each article in multiple languages can be a full time (not particularly exciting) job. That’s why MyFitnessPal wanted to test the waters before committing to the investment .

Testing and Launching

“We started by testing the translation of our Help Articles into one language. What we found was a decrease in the number of support cases by 20% and customer satisfaction increase by 50%! Using Unbabel to translate our FAQs has a clearly positive ROI!”

Julie Monniot-Gaillis, Localization Coordinator

MyFitnessPal was thrilled with the measurable results and considerable savings achieved with the reduction of support cases. And the process needed to be easy too. Unfortunately, they don’t use Zendesk Support, that would make it all really easy. That’s why their development team turned to our Translation API. Using it the MFP team was able to create a script to download all the articles, send them to Unbabel, and upload them back to the content management system where all the articles are stored.

MFP results in numbers

• 5 target languages (so far): Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese Brazilian, and French.
• 180k+ words translated
• $18,000 saved (compared to industry average price)

Unbabel is currently focused on translating customer support content. We translate customer support emails really fast (in some cases under 15 minutes), we provide live chat translation with native-quality in near real time, and we provide knowledge bases’ translation without breaking your budget.

If you are trying to scale your multilingual customer support operations, translation can be a key tool. To find out more about how we can help, reach out directly to our team and request a demo today.

Source: https://unbabel.com/blog/2170-multilingual-customer-support/