Weglot

You talking to me? Making customers our business

You talking to me? Making customers our business
Karina De Alba
Written by
Karina De Alba
Karina De Alba
Written by
Karina De Alba
Reviewed
Karina De Alba
Reviewed by
Updated on
June 19, 2023

How many times have you found yourself engaging with a brand or using a product you love, only to be left extremely disappointed with the lack of customer care when you eventually needed help? 

Going from department to department, unanswered emails, automatic hotlines or even worse, a company that simply doesn’t care about your problem…we’ve all experienced something along those lines at some point or another. 

At Weglot, one thing that hasn’t changed since day 1 is that we never want our customers to experience that. As the Director of User Experience at Weglot (hi, Karina here ✌), I thought I’d give you a bit more insight into our customer support ethos, how we grew the team and why we’re pretty proud of those 2000+ 5 star reviews.  

What makes good customer support? 

I think it’s pretty important to actually discuss what makes good customer support. Although it will always vary from company to company, for me it’s clear – empathy.

It’s something I’ve always considered an integral part to any company’s success when giving help to its users and it’s what I’ve challenged myself to achieve at Weglot. I’ve even written a previous blog post about it if you want to quickly check it out.

Why be empathetic? Well apart from the obvious (these are your paying customers after all), as a company we need to understand that just because we’ve got every aspect of Weglot figured out, that’s not always the case for our users. 

To be successful in the SaaS industry, the product alone isn’t always enough. End user support and having customer support built into the core of the process is what makes you stand out from the crowd. 

The circumstances and problems of each user is always going to be different. Our users not only want to feel heard, but also want to speak to an actual human being and not just a machine. 

Although such technology would make our lives easier, when it comes to our customer support, having a human touch and understanding for another person is what we believe in at Weglot. 

Building the Weglot support team 

In 2016 the support team consisted of Weglot co-founders Rémy and Augustin working late into the night solving customer issues. Fast forward a couple of years and the increase in Weglot users meant this was never going to work long term. 

Setting the tone 

Having joined the Weglot team in 2018 my task was to build a support team from scratch. As a previous long time resident of San Francisco (making my move over to France in 2015) I always knew that the type of customer service Silicon Valley companies provided was the mentality I wanted to establish at Weglot. Making the user feel like they’re unique and taken care of is what will set you apart from your competitors. 

There were numerous times when I felt that this type of support was just impeccable and I wanted to try to reflect that in the team and support we give here at Weglot. 

The goal is to have a delicate balance of friendliness, kindness, and tech savviness in order to help the user as best as possible. 

Getting the “right fit” 

Identifying what we needed personality wise was the next part of the process. I’ve always maintained that a good support team is made up of key personality traits that balance and enhance different aspects of the overall team. 

Strong empathy skills, a go-getter type of attitude (for those complex questions) and the ability to not let emotionally charged messages get to you are just a few of the qualities at the top of my list. 

Every team member at Weglot needed to not only contribute these qualities but also add their own personality. In my opinion this helps the team become stronger, but also allows us to help a bigger majority of users as we can tap into the differences each user has. 

My main criteria was to select people that would go above and beyond to help someone, but also someone that was able to integrate into a team where working together was something they actually enjoyed. 

My background is actually in psychology and I really felt that helped me find people that had a drive for learning, but also find people that felt comfortable enough to share their knowledge within the team. 

Finding the right people was a process and as a startup we took the time to grow our team at points when we felt we could no longer handle the increasing number of users, rather than making quick decisions. Giving ourselves more time enabled us to build a team that fitted within the company ethos and most importantly genuinely cared about the Weglot product and helping our customers get the most out of it. 

Probably the hardest part of building a team is trusting your gut on who is the right fit. Whilst it might sound corny, ‘feeling’ played a massive part in choosing who was right for each role. When you know your team from the inside out you know who is and isn’t going to fit immediately and my goal is to not throw off the balance of what I already established. 

When hiring, I like to talk to all potential candidates the way I would do any friend in order to understand how their mind works when it comes to being empathetic and showing interest in helping others. This mentality has helped us to hire some of the best people in our team! 

Another challenge is training the team. We all learn at different levels and paces so it naturally takes time to ramp everybody up to the same level knowing that we have a lot of cases to handle at the same time. Most days we’re receiving upwards of 250 questions and these can range from something simple, so something a lot more custom. We answer every customer, regardless of whether they are on a free or paid plan. 

Where are we now

It’s been a ride. I’ve been at Weglot almost 2 years now and since then 50,000+ websites are now using us as their translation solution – that naturally meant our once small support team has grown a lot to keep up with the demand of our users. 

Putting into practice what makes a good customer support team and hiring the right personalities has undoubtedly paid off. We average 4.7 out of 5 stars across Shopify and WordPress and reviews on TrustPilot are just getting started. We’re certainly not shy about celebrating our success and we take that pretty seriously 🥳. 

It’s taken time, dedication and a lot of hard work to take us from our co-founders solving problems into the night, to the now 7 strong team we are today! 


Here we are saying goodbye to some of our interns and hello to the new team!

But, if you think our interactions with our customers stop at the end of the purchase – you’d be wrong. As we’ve grown, more users are turning to our advanced and enterprise plans to match their growth needs. This means that they (along with users on smaller plans) require more guidance and interaction as they usually have bigger customizations or questions. 

Custom support is important, but so too is customer loyalty. We like to create die hard Weglot fans and when we take a breather to look at our reviews – I think I can be pretty sure we’re well on the way to achieving that goal. 

The future of Weglot support 

One of our biggest goals within the support team at Weglot is to continue improving our services when it comes to helping our customers. We’re constantly working to understand what does and doesn’t work in customer support and what’s key is that we always try the friendly approach no matter what the situation is. 

As we have more international users coming on board, the idea is to be able to give them the same high-quality support after hours as other customers working within the CE(S)T time zone – we don’t currently outsource any of our services so we’re working on how we can help every user equally. 

We are also hoping to make our FAQs as useful as possible as well as videos to help our users understand how to use Weglot to best fit their site’s needs and goals.

Drop us a line at [email protected] – we’re here and ready to help! 

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