Our Analysts' Insights

CSA Research is rolling out its 15^th annual comprehensive review of  the language services and technology industry – The Language Services Market: 2019 – along with 10 companion pieces. The industry continues its expansion as global digital transformation and purchasing power in long-tail markets make it a higher priority for enterprises to engage audiences on their own linguistic and cultural turf. Estimated to grow by 6.62% and to generate US$49.60 billion in revenue this year, enterprises rely on these industry partners to be able to deliver on international revenue commitments through building and delivering competitive global customer experiences.

The Big Findings In Our Latest Language Services Market Study

Based on up to 169 validated datapoints per verified survey respondent from a representative sample of CSA Research’s database of 18,000 LSPs and our proprietary algorithm, this report demonstrates that new capabilities to analyze and manipulate big data in local markets will continue to push advances and new applications within AI and the machine learning that it drives. Content will continue to morph as it becomes more conversation-centric to support more and more speech-enabled products and services. Royal Dutch Shell describes this evolution as “shifting from the speed of your thumb to the speed of speech.” It’s a colossal transformation in terms of how humans will engage with all of the devices that surround them.

Future-Proof Your Global Strategy for Intelligent Content Requirements

Among all the other tasks on their plates, how can organizations that purchase language services and supporting technologies prepare today for the onslaught of AI-inspired content and content forms? Here are four areas that you can start on right away: 

• Critique the customer experiences that you offer locally. Compare and contrast current and future customer journeys for your principal markets. Will Chinese, Indian, French, and North American consumers and business buyers engage with your brand and its products and services in the same way in a year or two? How do the various forms of engagement differ right now? Involve your domestic teams in these discussions – especially if their thinking hasn’t yet begun to evolve along these lines.

• Identify which competitors your performance will be compared to. Why? Because some of the audiences you’re responsible for may be more advanced already or following a substantially different path than your main domestic market. For example, applications such as WeChat or Rakuten World combine e-commerce, social messaging, user reviews, and payments functionality into one neat access point in contrast to multiple apps in the U.S.. As WeChat and Rakuten World gain happy users outside of their domestic market, the customer experience you currently provide may be measured against their performance, rather than against those which you used to be compared.

• Push for integration and further investment into global. Executive interviews and survey results from our recent digital transformation research demonstrate that including international feedback and envisaging how these initiatives will play out during global execution usually don’t appear in the KPIs or metrics being tracked. That’s because upper management frequently assumes that localization teams will take care of any multilingual content issues associated with digitalization further down the line. They see it as a language, rather than as a business process, issue.

• Engage strategic content service providers who can manage the final mile.Large consultancies such as Accenture and KPMG can handle the big picture for headquarters, but they often leave before the execution of their recommendations for local markets begins. Explore with your current language partner(s) how to expand their expertise to areas such as content audits and analysis, recasting source text as conversational content for chatbots, and enriching multilingual content – and any others fueled by AI. If they react blankly, then investigate the growing number of LSPs that are already investing in deep content capabilities to pick up where mainstream consultancies leave off.

A required component for future-proofing global content strategies is for firms to understand the various roles that supply partners can play in the complex, outsourced business process of language support. As the only verified and validated global analysis of private and publicly traded language services and technology companies, The Language Services Market: 2019 and its 10 companion pieces are designed to fill in and enhance this understanding. Click here for more information.