Our Analysts' Insights

Some people feel that using artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret human speech is a curse because individuals using the service could suffer harm due to mistranslations or because interpreters might lose their livelihood. Others embrace AI for all the possibilities it creates, first and foremost the ability to offer language access on a much greater scale and at a reduced cost. So which camp is right? Like so many techno-ethical questions, there is no right or wrong. It really depends on th...

There hasn’t been much discussion of what the Titanium Economy might be able to learn from the localization industry – language service providers or buy-side localization teams – as it relates to easing and speeding up the globalization journeys of the firms that make up this sector of industry. Obviously, fulfilling their translation and interpreting needs is one requirement, but there are three other areas that have a much bigger influence on determining success outside of their domestic ma...

At last – though with restrictions – international travel is starting up again. Whether for business, vacations, or long-awaited reunions with family and friends, people are beginning to cross borders and visit locations outside their home country. This of course means these travelers will spend money on transport, lodging, food, entertainment, and other shopping – if they can! Apps and purchase processes can work well for the local resident but still fail dramatically for international visit...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

Organizations usually don’t invest much money or energy incorporating their knowledge bases (KBs) into the global customer experience (CX) – whether it’s for an original language or a localized version for other markets. This is despite the fact that each KB interaction can increase or decrease the value of your brand in customers’ eyes and thus plays a key role in cementing their loyalty. Based on extensive interviews with 36 global firms about how they create and manage multilingual KB con...

In the past two years, most organizations interacting with CSA Research have undertaken some form of global digital transformation – whether it’s reimagining the entire company from top to bottom, or a narrow focus on re-vamping particular phases of the customer journey. One of our findings is the lack of attention paid to post-sales support content as an essential component for brand building, customer retention, and up-selling potential in international markets. We find firms guilty of this ...