Online consumers are exposed to infinitely more companies, products, and services than ever before. The catch? They all speak different languages. As digital globalization continues to connect brands with people, language defines how (and if) companies can communicate with customers.
In our webinar, Dive into the 2022 State of Global Experience (GX), Paula Shannon, Chief Evangelist at Lilt, uncovered important findings on digital strategies, trends, and best practices from over 1800 professionals managing global customer experiences at their companies.
The conversation focused on the following important points:
• Best practices for leveraging GX as a customer engagement tool
• GX as a key influence in the digital customer journey
• Cross-functional collaboration as a driver of GX success
• The need for GX to become a strategic business priority in 2022 and beyond
The Value of Language in the Customer Journey
Opening up the conversation, Paula and Allison Yarborough, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Lilt, discussed one of the most compelling statistics from this year’s report:
Across social media, blogs, customer support, and more, localization plays a significant role in allowing brands and companies to reach and engage with global consumers at key digital touchpoints.
“Data shows us that language is the missing piece. In different locales and markets, there’s a profound bias in people wanting to shop or being loyal to a brand if their content or experience is in their local language,” said Paula.
However, despite companies and businesses understanding the value of a multilingual customer experience for international markets, many are failing to put a thoughtful global experience strategy into practice. Paula suggests that evangelizing global experience management as a company-wide issue is the first step to bridging this discrepancy between intention and execution.
GX Management is Increasingly Cross-Functional
To position GX as a top strategic priority, it’s important to understand that the digital customer journey isn’t one-dimensional. A localized customer journey requires collaboration between multiple teams, such as product, support, marketing, and more, to ensure that every global market is receiving the attention, care, and resources needed to build outstanding customer experiences for each and every customer.
Oftentimes, this requires a complete transformation within a company.
“Realistically, when fewer people are focused on the same goal, it’s hard to accomplish a successful GX strategy,” Paula states. “And most companies have not bravely transformed themselves to focus on this customer experience.”
However, more teams within companies are starting to have increased ownership and collaboration across touchpoints to deliver one cohesive customer experience.
“I see this as great news. In my career, it was more typical that the person responsible for the global experience or localization was marooned in the IT and R&D departments because it was hard, technical, and difficult,” said Paula. “It’s great to see that 78% of GX management — if you couple CX and marketing — depends on teams on completely different sides of the company from where localization may have historically been.”
Looking Forward
As the world continues to become more digitally connected and globalized, it will become even more important for companies to think in terms of global experience and maintain a localization program that can grow and scale with increased global demand.
Looking into the future, successful global companies will be those that adopt a strategic mindset and build the foundations to ensure that global experience is a key component of customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention.
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To hear more of Paula’s thoughts about localization and global experience, watch the full on-demand webinar here.
If you’re thinking about localizing your content to expand globally, be sure to request a live demo of the Lilt platform today and chat with an expert to see how Lilt's translation services can improve your efforts.
