Our Analysts' Insights

Marketers strive to create the ultimate customer experience (CX), but we find that few spare more than a moment’s thought for how their home-market customer journey will work in other languages or countries. As a result, many businesses miss the vital requirement of engaging their global audience with content that resonates with them – not just with translated content, but with a full language experience that conveys their brand, reputation, and trustworthiness. CSA Research updated our long-r...

No one can predict when the ripple effects of COVID-19 will end. However, the results of our survey of 63 global enterprises in 19 countries indicate strongly that now is the time for organizations to plan for the scenarios that they will have to handle, whether under conditions of a prolonged recession or a cautious rebound. The effects on regional and local economies are already playing out in different ways at different speeds. Teams should prepare for the competitive landscape to look substa...

How companies respond to COVID-19 is showing just how seriously they treat the customer experience. Those that had good systems and processes in place before the pandemic have fared well, while others are finding that their costs are higher and their customers angry. The pandemic has revealed what companies should have been doing all along but had neglected. Although the current situation will challenge even the best run companies, those that have shown that they are there with their customers w...

Loyalty will rise to the fore after the COVID-19 pandemic runs its course. People will remember the brands that reached out in meaningful ways during the crisis. Start planning now to take advantage of loyalty to retain premium customers through the crisis and beyond as you strive to support them during the ensuing ramp-up or recession.

You buy a product or service once. What that means is that your journey from prospective buyer to customer can be a long and fraught passage. However, once you own it, the challenge changes to how to use it when you install it or something goes wrong. In our research on non-Anglophone markets, we stress-test post-sales support by putting ourselves in the shoes of people who don’t speak or read English very well but run into a problem. If a buyer in Bucharest is lucky, there may be documentation...

Consumer and digital marketers have so much to deliver that it often looks as if they’re trying to balance multiple spinning plates in the air. One of the trending initiatives that they must integrate into their strategies is the option of direct-to-consumer (DTC), in which their organizations revert to marketing, selling, and supporting individuals – rather than filtering them through third-party marketplaces such as Alibaba, Amazon, or Rakuten. This is a major shift for many medium- to large...

Are you leaving customers in the lurch when it comes to discovering the most relevant entries when asking questions of your localized knowledge base? Our research confirms that organizations tend to spend a lot of money creating a great deal of support content in its original form, along with subsequent multilingual versions. However, they oftentimes invest very little, if any, effort to analyze how external audiences attempt to access these repositories. As entries begin to calcify into legacy ...

Every day, nearly three quintillion bytes of digitized data come into being. This daily wave of new content supports interactions and transactions across the entire spectrum of human and machine activity – and localizing it is essential for many international business, governmental, and humanitarian activities. There is no sign of this daily growth in content volume slowing down – and with it comes gigantic projects to transform and translate it for other purposes and markets.

What does global customer experience or GCX mean for your organization? It encompasses the approach and the set of capabilities required to drive customer-centric transformation across an organization that operates in more than one country. GCX drives an ongoing cycle of improvement to the customer experience in local markets as part of a unified vision for the enterprise. It can include enhancements to existing products, services, and interactions, or the introduction of new ones. GCX represent...

Did you know that the language of flowers is not universal? We don’t mean the scientific classification or the Latin name, but rather the cultural implications. If you include florals in your marketing images for international content, be sure to consider them to avoid offending or off-putting intended audiences. This extends from the symbolism attached to specific flowers to even, in some markets, the color or number of individual blooms – there may be hidden implications.