BILINGUAL FORMS
Your form is in Spanish. Is the confirmation?
A Hialeah homeowner fills out your Spanish form. Nice. Then the confirmation email arrives in English, the booking page is in English, the reminder text the day before is in English, and the voicemail she gets when she calls with a question is in English. The form was the cheap half.
A note on what this is. This is not a claim about how many customers drop off when the language switches. It is a list of every place the Spanish usually stops, so you can check yours.
Where the Spanish stops
- The auto-reply. "Thanks for reaching out, we will be in touch."
- The booking page. Days of the week, "Confirm," the time-zone note.
- The confirmation text. "Your appointment is set for Tuesday at 10."
- The reminder the day before.
- The voicemail greeting on the main line.
- The review request after the job.
- The follow-up on the quote, all four messages.
Each one is written by a different person at a different time, and each one is English by default. The customer sees one company that started in Spanish and stopped.
THE LANGUAGE ON THE RECORD
One form, both languages
The form has a Spanish and an English version. Whichever one she fills sets the language on her record. From then on, the confirmation, the booking page, the reminder, the review request and the quote follow-up all come in Spanish, from the same templates you approved once. If she replies in English later, the record updates.
The voicemail
The one most companies forget. The greeting on the main line offers both: "Para español, marque uno." Or the voice agent asks in the first sentence. A Spanish-speaking caller who hits an English-only greeting assumes she dialed the wrong company.
Translation by a machine is where most of these go wrong. Every Spanish template in the system starts as a draft for a person to read. Miami Spanish is not textbook Spanish.
Questions we get asked about this
Do I need two websites?
No. Two versions of the form on one site, or one form with a language choice at the top. Either way the answer is saved on the record.
What if the customer switches languages mid-conversation?
The record follows the last language they wrote in. You can also set it by hand from the inbox.
Who writes the Spanish?
The templates come in both languages as a starting draft. You should have someone who speaks Miami Spanish read them once before they go live. We say the same on every page.
Related
Check your seven
Fill your own Spanish form from a phone that is not yours and follow every message that comes back. Count how many are in English. Bring the number to a 30-minute call.