Unbabel’s Translation as a Service comes to Microsoft Dynamics 365

As of today, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service users can integrate translation directly into their workflow by connecting with Unbabel’s solution, now available at Microsoft AppSource. All thanks to our latest customer service integration, companies using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for customer support will be able to understand and be understood by their customers in up to 28 languages.

In a world where nearly 75% of internet users don’t speak English, this allows global brands to finally address their customers in their own language. Messages going in and out of Dynamics 365 will be automatically translated through a combination of artificial intelligence and a network of tens of thousands human translators.

Simply put: it is easier to serve customers around the world with Unbabel’s integration with Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. Unbabel’s multilingual support solution is a good option for retail, tech, travel, hypergrowth companies and global enterprise.

Sona Vaish Venkat, General Manager, Intelligent SaaS at Microsoft explains:

“It’s easy to underestimate how sensitive customers are to the detail of how you communicate with them and, even at the best of times, this can impact your relationship. But at crucial moments like sales and customer service, it’s of fundamental importance to retain a native clarity.”

“Intelligent business applications like Dynamics 365 have been built in such a way that any business can solve this problem through Unbabel at the press of a button. This creates a meaningfully new era for these kinds of applications, and one that Microsoft customers can expect to see a lot more of in future.”

Unbabel has worked been working closely with Microsoft for some time now, working with the Skype team on realtime translation engine training, participating in its scale-up accelerator in London and receiving funding from its venture capital arm, M12, in its recent Series B round.

Unbabel now offers many integrations across the most popular CRM and Chat platforms like Zendesk, Salesforce, and Intercom.

To find out more about Unbabel’s latest partnership with Microsoft, we grabbed the boss himself, CEO Vasco Pedro, for a chat:

Q&A with Unbabel’s CEO, Vasco Pedro

So Vasco, tell us why this news is so important.

A lot of businesses are constrained to the market where they are founded and maybe another that English gives them. So they go to new regions more slowly. Part of that is customer support, service.

This usually requires a fairly big investment — hire a bunch of support agents (before you even know if you have the volume). You also start to see incoming questions about the product/service. There’s alway this nagging feeling: if we did support it, would we generate enough volume? And in the meantime, you’re providing fundamentally bad customer service.

We did a test, contacting some of the biggest companies’ customer service teams in different languages, and it was incredible how many companies would reply in English. In some cases, they would fudge it in Google Translate, maybe even just translating the phrase: “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

So you’re saying there’s a real opportunity here to get ahead of the competition and embrace new markets?

This whole idea of decoupling language from the customer service agent is still fairly new. It has been done in knowledge bases with something like Zendesk. But doing it in near real time meant you had to hire the people to do it.

The “as-a-service” is one of the fundamental aspects of how we approach translation. We believe Translation as a Service should be embedded directly in the tools and workflows used by fast-growing businesses and enterprises every day. It shouldn’t be this thing that is just another step in the process. It should be built directly into the rest of the process.

When we’re successful, for most people in the world, translation will effectively disappear.

How does this exist in most businesses’ minds at the moment?

Well, quite rightly, many of the companies we speak with aren’t thinking about translation. They are thinking about how do you provide excellent support to customers. How do you do it, what are the emerging opportunities — but just as importantly, how do you scale it?

That’s where businesses are suddenly realising that translation isn’t a nightmare of balancing slow, expensive translators or fast, but incredibly inaccurate Google Translate. It is an opportunity to add value to their customer service at the flick of a switch.

Prior to that, typical problems they talk about are “low volume language” — they can’t justify a full time hire. So they involve part time support in certain languages. But then you have peaks, think about travel agencies in particular. Suddenly you need a ton of people who speak French as that community start to book their holidays. Then German. Then the next language.

This fundamentally changes when you can just turn on 28 languages for your entire existing support team – which is precisely what we do at Unbabel day in, day out.

It becomes more meritocratic too because you are able to hire people 100% on their ability to look after your customer instead of the relatively arbitrary fact that they speak a certain language.

How is Dynamics 365 for Customer Service in particular part of this landscape?

Dynamics must be the fastest growing service in its area. There’s a channel side to this where Microsoft is really seriously aligning the incentives for its sales people and building a powerful ecosystem on top of that. When I met with Satya Nadella in January, this was precisely what they’re focused on in Redmond and around the world.

They have a great product but they understand as well as we do how important it is to allow software to plug directly into their system and add more value for customers.

That’s why we’re so pleased to be the first translation integration on the platform, and open the door to better delivery of customer service for all Microsoft customers.

Do you want to know how your team can also benefit from delivering seamless, scalable and trustworthy translations? Learn more about Unbabel’s translation for Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Or reach out directly to our team and request a demo.

Source: https://unbabel.com/blog/microsoft-dynamics-365-translation-as-a-service/