Question
How does Zendesk detect a language for a user in Support?
Answer
Zendesk detects the end-user's language in multiple ways. If you support multiple languages this article covers all potential situations in how the end-user's language is detected.
- How user languages are detected if the users are created by an agent
- How user languages are set if auto-detection is utilized
- What can I do if a user's language is incorrectly set?
How user languages are detected if the users are created by an agent
If an admin or agent creates a user, their language is automatically set to match the default language of your Support account. To change your default language, open Admin Center and navigate to the Localization page. Under the Localization tab, select your default language. For more information, see the article: Adding multiple languages to Zendesk Support.
How user languages are set if auto-detection is utilized
Auto language detection is only applicable to users who were not yet created in your Support account.
- Email: If an end user is not created in your Support account before submitting a ticket, then their language is automatically detected by the text contained in the body of their first email sent to your Support account. Subsequent emails or tickets won't overwrite this, even if another language is consistently used.
- Help center: An unregistered end user can select a language in the help center menu bar and submit a request from that locale. When their user is created, their language is identified with the language of the help center they were viewing upon ticket submission.
- Web widget: Zendesk can detect a user's preferred language from their web browser preference setting. The accept-language header, which is passed via HTTP, contains information about the user's language preference. If that is present, the language can be detected in the widget and set within Support. You can opt to override their browser preference by customizing your Web Widget. For more information, see the article: Advanced customization of Web Widget (Classic).
- Support SDK: If you are using the latest version of the Support SDKs, the language for new unregistered end users matches their device locale. If you don't support the device's locale, then the user's language is set to your account's default language.
- API: If the user is created through the API, the user's language is the default language of your Support instance. To select a specific language for the user, pass a locale in your API call.
- Social media: Language recognition doesn't work for social media tickets. When an end user sends a ticket from a social media platform such as Facebook Messenger, it's the default Zendesk account language that is associated with the end-user profile.
- Triggers: Triggers can also update a user's language within their profile when using the trigger action Requester: Language.
- Messaging: The user's language is detected from their web browser setting only if the browser language is enabled in Support. Variant languages will default back to the main language and main languages will not map with variant languages.
What can I do if a user's language is incorrectly set
Since the above information only sets the user language upon user creation, users' languages may be set incorrectly. Use any of the below options to resolve these errors.
- Manually change the user's language. This is done one at a time.
- Create a script using the Create or Update Many Users call in the Zendesk API.
17 comments
Max
hello there, so my customer sends a message on Whatsapp in English but the bot talks to him in French (default) because language recognition doesn't work on Social Media ? That's not a cool behaviour.. Any way to bypass that ? Thank you
0
christine.schulze
Just wondering: Why does Zendesk not detect language from the requester's subject line in e-mails? For us, the language is frequently set wrong because requester's decide to write only a subject line and nothing more.
1
Jupete Manitas
Depending on your end-goal but as per looking in our resources you can use the API to export your ticket data and use the
localeproperty. Like for Tickets endpoint, you can use locale to sort your tickets and can also be used in incremental exports .While Explore can also be used to look into your volume based on Requester locale attribute. Thank you!
0
Matthew Johnson
Hello! I am hoping to calculate volumes of tickets supported by language from data exposed via the Zendesk API. Is the default language for the customer's support account exposed in any way through any of the Zendesk API tables?
0
Paolo
Unfortunately, this feature is not available yet. Appreciate your feedback though! I encourage you to create a new post in the General Product Feedback topic to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds. Conversations with a high level of engagement ultimately get flagged for product managers to review when they go through roadmap planning.
Best,
Paolo | Technical Support Engineer | Zendesk
0
Hege Solheim
We have a multi-language Zendesk platform, with the default language set to English. Currently when creating a new customer, we enter the email address and then can input name/first name. For all other users than for our English-speaking markets, we then we need to close the customer created and reopen it then to correct the language in their user profile. As we have localized logos in our signatures per market, it is necessary for our agents to do this to ensure they do not email the customer with incorrect logo. Is there an option of adding "Requester language" to the user creation menu, in addition to email address and name?
0
Mariska Poiesz
Related to the point which Yvonne Uder raised, since "Social media: Language recognition doesn't work for social media tickets." is this an improvement which we can expect in the future? Currently we made a trigger to work around this.
0
Anne Ronalter
here you can read more about Managing languages in a bot.
Also feel free to leave Feedback in this similar Community post here:
[Messaging] Auto detect website language?
0
Thomas D'Hoe
How does language detection interact with messaging? Can the language of the end user be detected with messaging as you do with the web widget (classic)?
0
Yvonne P.
"Social media: Language recognition doesn't work for social media tickets. When an end-user sends a ticket from a social media platform like Facebook Messenger, it's the default Zendesk account language that will be associated with the end-user profile." - This makes no sense to me. As brands often have teams for various languages, as well as Faecbook Pages in those languages, why can Zendesk not detect the language here like it does with regular emails?
For routing to the language groups we need Zendesk to detect languages in social media messages like it does with emails as well. Any chance this will be improved soon?
2
Sign in to leave a comment.