Our Analysts' Insights

All companies have many regulations and business requirements to comply with today – plus additional scrutiny from enforcers and public commentary alike. It may seem like a never-ending list: doing what’s right for the business, humanity, and the planet. Corporate websites have sections for accessibility; commitment to employees; measures for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); global corporate responsibility; ecological sustainability; and more. Many are striving to find ways to use inclu...

In the late 19th century my great-grandfather, Otto, smuggled the culture for Gruyère cheese from Switzerland to the United States. Thinking about him reminds me of the “Swiss Cheese Model,” an approach to accident prevention that focuses on putting up multiple barriers that should collectively prevent major mishaps even if one or more of them has a hole in it. A similar “Reverse Swiss Cheese Model” applies to international customer experience. To see how, imagine an English-centric company ...

So you want to be big in Japan? What does it take to promote your brand in the country and how can you avoid being seen as a sub-par performer in a market widely known for its expectations for excellence? The Japanese market is an attractive prospect for foreign companies. As of 2021, Japan accounts for 5.7% of the world’s online economic potential, despite having just 2.8% of the global Internet-connected population. This post describes seven steps you can take to ensure that your Japanese con...

Populations that do not speak the dominant language are often ignored in the United States and elsewhere, with the exception of certain regulated industries, such as insurance and healthcare. Of course, Spanish is the major non-English language in the U.S. If treated independently, it would be the world’s eleventh-most-significant tongue in economic terms, just behind Italian and just ahead of Dutch. An additional 12 languages spoken in the U.S. surpass at least one official EU language in popu...

With over 222 million Arabic-speaking web users, and an online economic opportunity of 2.5 trillion US dollars in 2020, Arabic is an attractive option for global brands. Nevertheless, it appears on far fewer sites than its potential would indicate. Part of the reason is that localizing into Arabic is not a simple task as it is not a single digital language for content marketing and customer experience. The languages used in the Arabic-speaking world for conversation, social networks, messaging, ...

Consumers prefer accessing information, making online purchases, and getting technical support in their own language. That’s not a big surprise, but data from our third edition of “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy—B2C”, combined with our other research on website language support, highlights the fact that many consumers don’t have access to sites in their language, that localized websites often have major flaws, and that many must rely on English to get things they want or need.

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...

When was the last time your strategic planners or management team reviewed what you’re doing in China − and why? If it hasn’t been within the last 12 months, here are three reasons why it’s time for an assessment, along with recommended actions to take.

One of my guilty pleasures is reading paranoid political and military thrillers. One of the kings of the genre is Lee Child, whose hero, Jack Reacher, is an ex-military drifter who roams the United States, righting wrongs and saving the oppressed, usually with a maximum body count, gallons of strong coffee, and plenty of derring-do along the way. Reacher is like a distillation of American cinematic strong-men, from Charles Bronson to Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. But the author is British...

Delivering multilingual products, services, and programs is just one component required to win over local audiences – and a small one at that. One of the biggest challenges – even for globally-savvy organizations – is learning how to balance some of the other more significant factors to ensure long-term success in local markets. Based on our current research into globalization maturity consisting of interviews and surveys of more than two hundred companies, here are three areas that companies...