How Do You Provide Amazing Customer Experience? Webinar Highlights

With a virtual world, reaching international audiences has never been more attainable – people spend on average nearly seven hours a day online. Access may be easier but creating a globally consistent yet locally relevant and amazing Customer Experience (CX) to get people engaged is not always easy. Brands have to map the customer journey, speak the right language, know about local online habits, and be aware how customers from different cultures will interact with digital content.

According to CSA Research, if a company chooses not to localize the buying experience, they risk losing 40% or more of the total addressable market.

Welocalize webinar ‘How Do You Provide Amazing CX’ looks at global CX and how to map the customer journey and its various touchpoints, including top tips on localizing multimedia content.

Understanding Trends in CX

Rebecca Ray, Director and Senior Analyst at CSA Research opens the webinar, sharing research and insights on how brands can use language as a wow factor. Rebecca emphasized that with a considerable shift to a virtual world (largely thanks to COVID-19 in 2020) and increase in digitized processes, B2B and B2C have converged to Direct to Customer (D2C) and brands are looking to maximize the D2C experience, pre, purchase (including payment), and post-sales.

CSA Research shows the value of investment in language and localization at every touchpoint. In a CSA Research report on Global CX, when asked about user reviews and the question asked was ‘If you don’t have any other material in a local language, would you still prefer products that provided you with user reviews in your language?’ and out of the 1000s of people participating (approximately 8700 people in 53 countries), around 75% of them said ‘yes they would definitely prefer user reviews in their language.’

The business case for localizing the CX for target markets is strong – and the data provided by CSA Research supports that. The next challenge is where do you start? To begin with, you need to fully understand the customer journey.

Mapping The Customer Journey

Next up – Joe Johnston, Senior Analytics and Conversion Consultant at SearchStar who considers the different touchpoints that customers go through on their path to purchase. Who owns those touchpoints? And how can we adapt that framework for new markets? A good starting point is to build a CX map, allowing brands to build empathy for customers and understand how the experience plays out from their point of view – being customer centric rather than individual internal business units operating on different objectives.

CX mapping is an excellent framework that can be applied to any country and for CX’s that don’t even exist yet.

Interested in a customer journey mapping workshop? Connect with us here.

Leveraging & Localizing Multimedia in CX

More and more brands are using interactive features and video elements to engage (and educate) their customers and audiences. Next up on the webinar – Welocalize’s Senior Multimedia Engineer, Michael Anderson giving insight into how you can best approach multimedia localization to boost global CX. One of the main takeaways is to consider localization from the outset. This means considering the possibilities of text expansion (Russian takes up 40% more space than English), how subtitles may fit, whether motion graphics can easily have text edited, and how a voice over can be easily synched to the source material. Availability of source files is also crucial – otherwise you could be faced with having to recreate from scratch which can be expensive and take time. The more universal the source content (words and images), the easier it will be to adapt to an international audience.

Here are some takeaway tips from our experts on how to maximize the impact of Global CX:

Rebecca: Consider maturity and which vertical sector an organization is in. Both will affect CX in terms of how customer act in international markets plus how localization activities are structured. Many organizations tend to start off quite decentralized in their localization activities and move to be more centralized. As long as everyone is communicating and aligned – and that’s the big challenge.

Joe: Be research-led and as customer centric as possible. Conducting user research in different markets will uncover unique behaviors, needs, and expectations. They’re all going to have different interfaces, platforms, and cultural standards. You might find lots in common in what people expect in an online experience in the UK and US, but it’s very different when looking to expand into an Asian country like Japan. You need to speak to real people and understand what their different expectations are.

Michael: For multimedia, have editable source files available and look out for language expansion. Always consider localization from the start. These simple actions will make localization easier and will save costs.

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If you’d like to elevate your localization strategy and create amazing global CX, connect with us here.

For more global insights, you can view all our on-demand webinars here.