This might be a strange post since we have a German contributor but I'd like to see if anyone has expxerience of providing support to people in non-English speaking countries.
At the moment, I sell software in English only via a .co.uk site. This allows me to target the UK, US, Australia, India etc. but there is an untapped market in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and so on. The thing that's put me off for now is providing support or even answering simple queries. My wife was (once) fluent in German and lived in Germany for a couple of years. The trouble is that her German is now rusty and neither of us speak anything else but English.
Does anyone have experience of providing support in this way? How do you cope? Is it a problem or are customers happy to switch to English?
by ML
I asked these kind of questions when Gerhard offered to translate Ideaspad for me.
ReplyDeleteHe said at the time he would translate for me.
I've never had any phone calls from outside the UK.
Although Ideaspad isn't that successful and this lack of calls may be due to lack of customers.
You can use the google translator for most things and of course you can find someone to translate for you.
However, when I do get german support emails I email them back and ask if they can provide their question in English. This hasn't been a problem as most Germans seem to speak english.
I would worry later if it becomes a problem. Perhaps you can put some sort of support website together.
With regard to a german website, I think you need to be a german business with a postal address in germany to get a .de domain.