88: Cross-cultural Support with Aurore Lanchart

Charlotte Ward 0:13
Hello, and welcome to Episode 88 of the customer support leaders podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is cross cultural support. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I would like to welcome back to the podcast today, Aurore Lanchart. Oh, it’s lovely to have you back. And we’re here today to talk about cross cultural support. You’re based in France and you’ve worked with support teams who support a broad range of customers from like from all sorts of different localities, right. So could you talk to me about your experiences there?

Aurore Lanchart 0:57
My experience is it’s really different, between countries in Europe because in Europe, you have a big diversity. So for example, when I worked in e commerce with had Spanish customers, German customers, English and French, and it was really, really different because your Spanish customer won’t fried at all your FAQ, just will ask you a question. Meanwhile, your German customer will read everything in your FAQ, and then we’ll ask you when they have no clue about the problem. So it’s kind of different. It’s so you have to do the same support for every country but you know, you have to adjust because of the cultural difference.

Charlotte Ward 1:51
So it’s as much about adjusting our expectations of how our customers approach the product or the service as as, as adjust how we respond to them then?

Aurore Lanchart 2:03
Yeah, sure, I think there isn’t negative according to the tone of voice as well, because, for example, you have to be more friendly with Italian or Spanish casma. Because their culture is so warm and you don’t need to be so warm with, for example, British or German because the culture is a bit just formed, then house Europe. And it’s not so much,

Charlotte Ward 2:32
but a bit you won’t take that personally I won’t take. I agree, though, I think that certain groups of customers, I mean, I don’t want to kind of settle on nationalities. But I think nationalities obviously play a big part of this. But I think I think that there are certain cultural differences that we have to appreciate, you know, affect how our customers communicate with us, right?

Aurore Lanchart 3:01
And I think it’s important to edges because when you understand really precisely the culture of the customer, you can have trade and bonds you know, you are more close to your customer and they can have more love for your brand and for your product. So it’s really important to to understand and I think the key is to recruit native for the country for example, if I do support for Spain, I won’t hire someone from Latin America because even they speak Spanish or a French who speak perfectly Spanish because even they speak the language. You don’t have all the cultural things, you know the details of the culture. Yeah, yeah,

Charlotte Ward 3:48
the culture is more than the language isn’t it? It’s it’s the the entire customer context. You’re absolutely right. It’s not just language. It’s It’s It’s the societal constructs around, how they, how they relate to each other as human beings and how, you know, fit down down to the TV they watch or the way the government treats them things like all of these things like really influence a person’s approach to everything in life. Right?

Aurore Lanchart 4:17
Yeah. Because my point is, customer support is about empathy, that you have empathy, you have more empathy with people that we work close with. So if you don’t have the same culture, you can have empathy but not the level of empathy required to to provide a really great

Charlotte Ward 4:39
so you don’t think we can train for that

Aurore Lanchart 4:42
train for empathy? You can train that. There is a lot of studies saying that you have more empathy with people. They are like you so it’s easier. It’s more natural for you to be more embedded with people like you from this Same background from the same culture from the new country,

Charlotte Ward 5:03
it would be nice to think that we all had enough budget to hire somebody for every nationality that we were required to support. But scaling that is is a bit problematic, isn’t it? and hiring for is a problem as well actually hiring someone with the cultural background that you’re looking for the in the timezone with the skills. I mean, I guess a lot depends on the service that you’re supporting, or the product that you’re supporting. But, I mean, in my team, for instance, you know, like really super skilled engineers. If I start adding extra layers onto that list of requirements, it’s an ever shrinking pool of people, isn’t it?

Aurore Lanchart 5:49
If it depends of the company, I think of the culture for example, I know two companies, one French called Nero and fresh works. They have people for every country. It’s freelancers, but they manage to have people from every countries to provide a better support. And I think it’s really relevant. People we do more and more remote. So maybe you can have people in remote, maybe just for timesheets really short like just the morning you have people in Germany and then just the afternoon you have someone for Sweden or Peru. I don’t know. I think you can provide this kind of support using this strategy.

Charlotte Ward 6:35
Yeah, using freelancers to give you that flexibility. That’s it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com/88 for the show notes, and I’ll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai