Knowledge for Multilingual Service Desks

The knowledge management functionality in 4me includes an advanced feature for service desks that provide support in multiple languages. This feature makes use of the ability to translate knowledge articles. Any specialist or service desk analyst who has the language skills can translate the knowledge articles of the support organization to ensure that they are available in the supported languages.

Once a knowledge article has been translated, the right translation is automatically proposed in 4me Self Service to ensure that end users see the knowledge in their preferred language.

That is not what’s so special, however. The feature that is really special was added for the analysts of a multilingual service desk. This unique feature is best explained by an example:

Let’s say that the default language of a support organization is U.S. English and the language preference of one of its end users is French. If this end user calls the service desk because she wants to know how she can book a conference room, the service desk analyst can search for this knowledge in the language of the end user, or in his own preferred language. Either way, the knowledge article will be found.

By default, the results will be displayed in the language of the end user whenever the translations are available. That is, after all, the language in which the service desk analyst will need to provide the instructions.

If, for some reason, the instructions need to be provided in the default language of the support organization, the service desk analyst can click on the circular language indicator to switch to this language.

In this particular example, the knowledge article is available also in Spanish. Had the language preference of the service desk analyst been set to Spanish, then the service desk analyst would have been able to toggle from French to Spanish to English (and back to French again) by continuing to click on the language indicator.

When the service desk analyst leaves the language set to the preferred option of the end user and selects the knowledge article to open a new request, the instructions of this knowledge article are added to the new request in the preferred language of the end user. That means that as soon as the request is saved, these instructions get sent via email to the requester in the correct language.