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Bridging the corporate communications gap with localization
The world of digital communications in business is evolving. Many businesses are beginning to realize the importance of Customer Communications as a sure-fire way to reach new users and thus expand into the newer market.
With the hope of creating market opportunities beyond borders, these businesses are optimizing how to identify their customers, prospect them to generate leads, and ultimately convert these leads to sales.
While the funnel of conversion is well-defined, most businesses have heavily focused on avenues of communications instead of the nature and elements of communications themselves.
Today, we have omnichannel avenues that can help a business in any industry reach its customers through not just one stream like offline media but also channels like social media, email, chat apps, app notifications, etc.
Even though the next logical step needs to evolve and personalize communications at scale, businesses focus on Customer Acquisition instead of Customer Retention when they start. A key aspect of Customer Retention directly relies on personalized content, followed by localization of communications as per the customer’s geographics and, therefore, their local language.
Need for Localization
If we pay attention to some statistics, we will notice that over 70% of the population are non-English speakers . Even amidst the English speaking groups, there exist versions of the language as per region, e.g., American English differs from British English in terms of spellings and some common nouns etc.
Similarly, English in Europe varies as one moves through countries – it gets colloquial in some countries, and it gets a different grammar form of English in some others.
The nature of communication also changes as per the intended tone. For example – if you need to exchange pleasantries with someone, there are some local phrases that you need to know and understand well. If you have to share instructions, the intent of your communication changes; you need to be well-aware and be mindful to not end up being disrespectful to your listeners.
There’s also a variation of English in its spoken and written forms. Yet again, depending on your channel of communication, you need to be understanding of the differences. While some variations can be subtle, as your business grows and spends time in a new market, you get assessed by how well you update your Customer Communications for your users.
For countries like Hungary, China, Japan, The Gambia, Malawi, Colombia, Swaziland, Brazil, Russia, Argentina, Algeria, Uganda, Yemen, Chile and Tanzania, the population of English speakers is less than 10%. India, which has a large market for any-sized businesses, is home to more than 400 million people who cannot read or write in English.
Consequently, when international and local businesses try to send communications to them through various English channels, most users fail to understand what they are trying to convey.
Why organizations never look beyond a default language for communication?
There are various reasons why organizations still focus only on English as their primary language when they communicate with their customers. Primarily because by sticking to one language and keeping it English, they can save up on many costs since English is a popular language used across the globe, even if less than 400 million global consumers have English as their native language.
To reach most users, translation into various native languages is still done at a fundamental level using either open-sourced technologies or by doing translations manually.
Both these approaches are not very scalable, and the complexities keep rising as the volume of customer communication grows over time. Apart from this, open-sourced technologies do not consider the contexts of customer communications, such as looking into the tone, the semantics, and the delivery style, which may apply to a particular scenario but may not work for all scenarios.
Since most customer communications need to be objective-driven and controlled, achieving this in multiple languages may take a lot of effort to maintain and fulfill. For manual translation processes, one would need to hire resources who can perform the translations and get the communications from concept to execution. Thus, as the business grows, the cost to manage manual translation processes and hire personnel increases exponentially.
Some Interesting stats around localization
There are many reasons why personalized and localized customer communication is essential. Across various sectors like healthcare, banking, insurance, retail and legal – users have shown purchase behaviors that are positively impacted if they get communications from businesses in their local languages.
0
%
of users will only buy from businesses that have their websites in their native language
0
%
of customers wouldn’t buy from a website that supports only English-based customer communications
0
%
How is it beneficial to your business?
The benefit of personalization and localization strategy for a business can be multi-fold. Personalized and localized customer communication can help companies from the lead generation step to the post-purchase experience.
Marketers report higher returns on marketing and advertising spending if they provide content to an audience in a localized manner.
Having automated personalization of content allows businesses to have a sustainable revenue stream as they can then expand to newer markets with fewer product and service innovations every year. While some businesses would want to invest more into shipping new products, most small to medium-sized businesses begin with a limited number of products which they’ll then use to achieve multiple goals. These goals are:
Establish a brand
Loyal customer base
Great product-market fit
The businesses have a limited budget to diversify their product portfolio and have even more, limited resources to invest in the research and development aspects from the beginning. It can become difficult for newer businesses to compete in markets where other businesses are constantly focused on bringing personalized content to improve the customer experience, especially for their newer customers.
To perform market sensing and gain customer and investor confidence, most businesses can rely on personalization and localization strategy of their customer communications right from the time they first make a sale to the time they address a customer query for the very first time. The idea is to ensure that businesses do not miss out on market opportunities and do not get a biased opinion of their product’s market fitment by avoiding a one-language-suits-all approach.
For the Indian market, a business needs to be agile enough to promote and sell its initial line of products and services by appealing to a wide range of users. The best way to do so is by employing personalized and localized messaging in their customer communications. With localization strategy, businesses can reach multiple tiers of cities, towns and villages and market their products optimized without making too many changes to their product offering itself.
Perfect Doc Studio – What it offers?
Automation is the key to achieving optimized personalization and localization in customer communication. A CCM solution that is efficient enough to automate the localization of customer communications in near-real-time, and is affordable enough for newer businesses to begin reaping the benefits of localization, can be a good enabler of personalization and localization strategies in this process.
Good automation features would also mean that such a CCM solution would support iteratively improving the personalized content that their employer businesses send out to their customers.
Perfect Doc Studio is an excellent Customer Communication Management solution that offers the personalization and localization of content for over 100 languages used worldwide. With highly sophisticated automation features, it enables personalized content generation for any-sized customer base in near-real-time, across multiple communication channels.
This studio comprises easy-to-use tools that help businesses create, update and extend the delivery of personalized customer communications in a self-serve manner. It can be natively integrated with BPM and CRM solutions as part of your business processes and can automate customer communications over six different channels.
Perfect Doc Studio is a cost-effective enterprise-grade Customer Communication Management solution suitable for any-sized business. It helps business growth and allows them to create a difference in the world.
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