Most SMM automation speaks English and nothing else. In Nairobi or Dar es Salaam that is not a blocker — plenty of buyers read English fine — but it is a filter, and filters cost money quietly.
The customer who hesitates over an English menu does not complain. They just stop replying.
Language per customer, not per shop
The instinct is to pick one language for the shop. That is the wrong unit.
Your customers do not share a language. Some want Kiswahili, some prefer English, some are ordering from outside the region entirely. A shop-wide setting makes you choose which half to serve.
The setting that works is per customer: each person's conversation runs in their own language, decided the first time they message and remembered after that. One bot, one number, one catalogue — several languages.
What actually needs translating
Not everything. The parts that carry money or instructions:
- The menu and service names
- Prices and wallet balance
- Payment instructions, which is where confusion is most expensive
- Order confirmations and status updates
- The error you send when something fails
Marketing copy matters less than people expect. A customer who has already opened the chat is not reading your pitch — they are trying to buy something, and they want the next step to be unambiguous.
Where it changes behaviour
Two places, in our experience.
The first is payment. "Tuma pesa kwa namba hii" removes a hesitation that "send payment to this number" leaves in place for some buyers. Payment instructions are exactly where a misunderstanding turns into a support message instead of an order.
The second is support. A customer who can describe a problem in their own language gives you a usable description. In a second language they give you "haifanyi kazi", and you spend three messages finding out what it means.
The practical setup
If you are on Resellers Hub, the bot speaks English, French, Kiswahili, Turkish or Hindi, chosen per customer rather than per shop. It is a setting, not a rebuild.
If you are building your own, the thing to get right early is that the language belongs to the customer record, not to a global config. Retrofitting that later means touching every message you send.