With today’s heightened connectivity, the importance of being able to communicate with the rest of the globe weighs on businesses even more.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) firms address these companies’ needs by offering multilingual call center services.

Now, any brand can engage with customers on the phone through the language they are most comfortable using.

But what about on the Internet?

Out of the 7,000 languages we have today, the 10 most spoken are Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, Urdu. That is if we’re basing on the number of people speaking these. But if we’ll look at the Internet population, you’d see a different picture of how the world speaks online.

According to data collected by W3Techs in 2021, English is the number one language used on the Internet, followed by Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Persian.

French, German, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese complete the top 10. Some of these languages rank higher on online languages despite having lower places in the overall rankings.

What Does This Mean?

The languages that people use on the Internet are not solely dictated by the size of a country’s population. There are larger factors that play a part here, particularly a population’s access to the web.

More than anything, it means that language is a driving force that’s shaping online customer service today.

Choosing a second business language requires more than just measuring a language’s speaker population, especially for modern businesses that cater to diverse markets.

If you have multichannel support but only deliver multilingual customer service on the phone, then you’re only doing things halfway. There should also be efforts on fortifying your web-based communication channels. Some do this by creating multilingual websites or having multilingual agents answer customer queries via live chat, email, and social media.

It’s not yet late to embrace a second business language online. Of course, what you’d use should depend on what your audience wants. So, have you already asked yourself what language your business should speak on the Internet?

Open Access BPO is a full-suite multilingual contact center that offers customer experience, back office, and content management services for international brands. Get in touch with us to outsource.