Local language support from our Customer Service team

Author: Diana Petrowicz

The Customer Service team at Springer Nature supports you with any questions you might have about access, technical questions or general enquiries. Our team with locations in the UK, Germany, Japan, Singapore, China and the US will make sure no question remains unanswered and provides a 24/7 service. Our Customer Service, Online Service and Author Service (including Open Research Support) teams can now assist you by email in any of the following languages: English, German, Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Modern), Portuguese (European and Latin American), Spanish (European and Latin American), French and Turkish.

The additional language support has been made possible through collaboration with a third party translation service. After a very successful trial period, during which we received positive feedback about the quality of translation from our customers, the service has now been fully implemented. The tool is integrated into our Freshdesk query management tool, which means queries that are sent in local languages are translated automatically into English. Our Customer Service agents draft their reply in English which is automatically translated back into the same language as the original customer query. Every email includes a note informing the customer that this message has been translated by an automatic translation service. Should the tool encounter any elements that it cannot confidently translate, it will be supplemented by human translation. Those human translations are then fed back into the machine-learning translation engine, allowing the quality of translation to keep improving over time. The translated email looks and feels to the customer exactly as though it was sent directly from a member of our teams. The solution is completely secure and meets data protection regulation.

With this new tool, we are now able to improve and extend the service to our customers even further, by enabling teams around the world to support tickets in languages that could only be handled by native speakers in specific regional teams previously. In some cases, this can also speed up the turnaround time for a ticket. With help of the automatic translation tool the English speaking team has, for example, been able to reply to a query from Germany within 20 minutes. Our Customer Service team looks forward to receiving your queries, please contact us at onlineservice@springernature.com or have a look at our Springer Nature Support pages, which are also increasingly being translated into more of the local languages that we support.