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S05E02: Customer Engagement through Localization

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Simon Mitton from TravelPerk speaks with the Translation Company Talk podcast about customer engagement through localization

S05E02: Customer Engagement through Localization

In this episode of the Translation Company Talk podcast, we hear from Simon Mitton from TravelPerk about how localization impacts customer engagement. A season industry veteran, Simon speaks about his experience in the industry and how it has evolved with evolution of technology.
Among other subjects we discuss how enterprises deliver a good customer experience through localization that keeps customers engaged, the difference in impact of localized vs natively developed content on customer experience, technology that enables customer engagement and a variety of other related topics.

Every step of the customer journey needs to reinforce the sense that we have a solution for them that's going to make their lives easier. There are a lot of studies out there that talk about how important product information is in driving that initial engagement. How many customers will bounce straight off websites or product pages that aren't localized. But it's also important to understand the markets you're entering into to ensure that information is pitched correctly in the first place.

Simon Mitton

Topics Covered

Customers' perception of localized content

Impact of wrong localization

Effectiveness of natively generated vs. localized content

User experience considerations in translation

Leveraging technology to improve user experience through localization

Using localization to attract and maintain user attention

Customer Engagement through Localization

Intro

Hello and welcome to the Translation Company Talk, a weekly podcast show focusing on translation services and the language industry. The Translation Company Talk covers topics of interest for professionals engaged in the business of translation, localization, transcription, interpreting, and language technology. The Translation Company Talk is sponsored by Hybrid Lynx. Your host is Sultan Ghaznawi with today’s episode.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Welcome to this episode of the Translation Company Talk podcast. As always, the goal of this podcast is to educate colleagues in our industry about the business of language. Today, we are going to cover how we can improve customer engagement and develop better relationships with our customers through the process of localization.

 

To speak to me about that, I’ve invited Simon Mitton. Simon, discovered localization by chance in the late 1990s and since then has spent time solving the industry’s challenges. From both sides of the client-provider relationship for companies such as Canon, SDL, Expedia, and WeLocalize. He’s currently bringing that experience to building a localization program at the Business Travel Tech Travelperk. When not wrestling with localization processes, Simon is a full-time parent to three children and five cats, which doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

 

What free time he has usually goes on books, movies, and music, and consuming any form of sport he can find being broadcast anywhere. Simon, welcome to the Translation Company Talk podcast.

 

Simon Mitton

Thank you. How are you, Sultan? Good to speak to you.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

For people listening to you for the first time, please introduce yourself and tell us what you do.

 

Simon Mitton

Sure. Well, thanks again for inviting me on here. It’s great to speak to you. My name is Simon Mitton. I’m the localization program manager at Travelperk. Travelperk is a global business travel management platform, and we’re all about connecting people in real life in a sustainable and enjoyable way. For me and my role, that’s about making sure our products are accessible to all our customers in the same way, regardless of which language version of the product they choose to work with. My role is primarily product-focused, but I also work with our marketing teams to support their localization requirements and generally look out for any other areas of the business where localization is a factor in case there are opportunities there to help out with that as well.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

How did you find yourself in the localization industry? What’s your story?

 

Simon Mitton

Well, it’s quite a long story. So long, in fact, it started in a whole other century. It’s probably a little unusual as well for our industry, in that I don’t come from a language background. I studied information systems at university, and I was working for Canon back in the late 1990s in a technical support role.

 

My route into localization came via quite an innocuous route, really. Canon held a company discovery day event in the office where I was based, which was a European systems management hub. On this discovery day, people from different departments presented their function to the rest of the organization. I sat in on the presentation given by a guy called Jonathan Barrowing, who some of your listeners may know from around the localization industry.

 

Jonathan talked about what localization was, how the team operated, and the value that it brought to Canon. And it was actually the first time I’d heard this story and this process. And I was fascinated by it. Not just the process itself, but the implications of what it meant for the wider business. I spoke to Jonathan after that presentation and a few months later, I joined the team as a project manager. Now, suddenly, 25 years later, I’m still here.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

How has your journey been so far? And what has really stood out to you as significant events in our industry? What actually shaped your journey?

 

Simon Mitton

So, I think the phrase is, it’s been a long and winding road. It’s been 25 years. I’ve had a number of different stops on that journey. Where I’ve been lucky is that I’ve spent large amounts of time on both sides of the relationship. So, client organizations like Canon, Expedia, and now here at Travelperk, but also in service provider roles for companies like SDL, as they were when I was working with them, and we localize. Each one of those stops has taught me something valuable about what drives client organization requirements, and what it takes for service providers to meet those requirements.

 

I guess, looking back over 25 years, what you see is an industry capable of great flexibility and change. During my time at Canon, I was responsible for the localization of Canon’s multi-pass multifunctional devices. A product that was a combined printer, scanner, and fax machine. And if you leave aside the question of what a fax machine is, which the younger listeners are going to be asking, those projects were huge. Full iterations of user interface text, both for the software on the computers, but also on the devices themselves. Huge help components, printer operation guides. These projects ran for months and cost vast amounts of money.

 

The day-to-day life of someone working on localization operations has changed dramatically, just as it has for our linguists. Workflow management tools, machine translation, AI, of course, they’ve all changed the landscape of how our industry works compared to when I first became involved.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I have invited you today, Simon, to speak about the role of localization and driving customer engagement in target markets, something you probably are very familiar with. Please give us a general overview of how localization drives customer engagement today.

 

Simon Mitton

So, I think the key to this is that localization function serves to support the business, speaking to customers in ways they understand and that are relevant to them. That probably sounds really basic, but it is that fundamental. From a product perspective, we want to be able to offer our platform to users in their own language to make using our service familiar and comfortable and remove barriers to adoption. But of course, in order to bring customers to the point where they’re using our products, we have to engage them with our sales process, with demos, collaterals.

 

Every step of the customer journey needs to reinforce the sense that we have a solution for them that’s going to make their lives easier. There are a lot of studies out there that talk about how important product information is in driving that initial engagement. How many customers will bounce straight off websites or product pages that aren’t localized. But it’s also important to understand the markets you’re entering into to ensure that information is pitched correctly in the first place.

 

If you think about acquisition as well, thinking about how people find your business and that initial engagement. Trade shows and advertising are great, but search engines also prioritize results that come from localized websites. Even if you’re working in a sector, as I do now, where English adoption and proficiency is high, you have to be visible to be at the earlier stages of that customer journey just to get into the game in the first place.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I think this is a very tough question, but when does a customer really care or know that the content they’re consuming is actually localized?

 

Simon Mitton

Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s something I’m currently interested in digging into more at Travelperk. I think the most obvious and painful time that customers both know and care about is when localization isn’t done well. Poor translation, basic errors in spelling or grammar, the kind of thing that you notice and that really jumps off the page. That applies equally to English source content as well, of course. But those are going to be the times that the consumer is going to pay attention to it. Beyond that, the question of how customers use our products is a big focus for us. We have a fantastic UX research team here and we are always looking for insights that we can turn into product improvements.

 

So, one thing I’m keen to do here, is make use of this facility to get in front of customers and actually find out how important language is to them. The localization function here is relatively young. We’re establishing an LQA program along some typical metrics and standards, but I’m also really interested to capture some direct feedback from customers. If they’re using our localized product, what’s that experience actually like? What can we learn experientially alongside standard metrics? If they’re not using our language versions of our products, what are the blockers to them doing so? And if we’re not in their language yet, how much value would adding that language bring? And that last item is particularly interesting given our market.

 

We operate in a function and service where consumers typically have a high level of English. So does that make translating into certain markets less valuable? Or does it mean when we do translate into those markets, it’s more important to do it well? Because if the experience isn’t good, consumers will just revert to the English. So, it’s a fascinating area. It’s a fun space to be in as a localization professional.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Simon, I believe localization is a transformative process as is product design, for example. I mean, customers think about the design of a chair when they sit on it, and they don’t feel comfortable. You mentioned this earlier, localization is kind of similar. Is that the same case with localization, where when things don’t work, everyone starts complaining and when it works, it just works?

 

Simon Mitton

Absolutely, I think it is. There’s a reason we have favorite chairs. They meet our needs and our own requirements in the best way, and we feel good when we’re using them. Computer products and services that are well-designed generate the same response in users as does the language that we use. A great example is terminology, of course, a pillar of our industry for a long time. Travelperk operates in the business travel space, which means we have to be sure that we talk about features of travel in the right way, so our customers feel comfortable, that they know and understand what they’re booking when they choose to commit their spending through our platform.

 

Aside from the specifics of staying in line with the wider industry, we also want customers to have that sense of familiarity, whatever they’re doing on our platform, whether it’s booking travel, managing users, reporting data, the right language is an essential part of that experience. Here at Travelperk, the product localization function is embedded with the product design team. So, I get to see our amazing team of UX designers in action every day. And that’s a great motivator for me to keep up with what they’re doing when it comes to our language experience.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let’s look at the difference between consumption of natively generated content in a specific market versus content that has been imported, adapted and localized. What are the differences that the consumers actually notice?

 

Simon Mitton

I guess in theory, there shouldn’t be any noticeable differences at the point of delivery. If the process is well executed, as we talked about before, a lot of that success comes down to correctly identifying the type of content we’re working with, what expectations we have of how that content will land with our customers. Obvious example, I don’t think any of our customers using our German products, for example, would expect that the product has been developed in German. So, what we expect is that the translations of our products work well functionally and carry the right meaning.

 

The seamless booking experience requires the user to understand what the features that their booking is offering are and what features our product is going to deliver to them. So, an understanding of the market and the service that we’re providing is important. And we want to talk about the travel industry, but creativity isn’t super important in the product. Where it gets more interesting is talking about marketing materials, blogs, case studies. In those situations, we’re looking for a much more natural and native experience. And I think this is where customers can notice a difference between something that’s been translated and something that’s been created in the target market language if the translation and the adaptation aren’t done well.

 

So, customers will notice idioms or cultural references that haven’t been tailored. They’ll notice if we’re referring to features that aren’t relevant in their market. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible to get the right result from translation or transcreation or however, you define it. But it does require the right briefing for linguists. So, they fully understand what we’re trying to achieve with the material they’re translating.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

When it comes to return on investment, what yields the highest result? Is it recreating the content for a specific market or adapting existing content from a different market?

 

Simon Mitton

I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer to this. If we look at Travelperk’s website performance, for example, there’s very little difference in conversion metrics between the English website, which is obviously predominantly content created in English, and the localized sites, which are around 80% translated content. I think in most cases the important thing is the content itself. If we create engaging content and we talk to our customers about our products in ways that speak to the challenges they need to solve, then we’ll continue to be successful.

 

In some cases, that will be by creating content. In others, it will be centrally driven campaigns that we translate or transcreate. I think our role in our industry and our field is to have the right content at each step of the customer’s journey.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Simon, does user experience really matter when a content is being translated and localized? Do translators think about what the end user might think, feel, perceive, and be impressed by when consuming content?

 

Simon Mitton

Yeah, 100%. It does matter. We’re all about customer experience here at Travelperk. Our aim is for what we call a seven-star experience. That’s the level we shoot for, whether it’s at the beginning of the customer journey with the sales operation, right through engagement, onboarding, and the delivery of the product. Seven-star means different things to different people, depending on which part of the business you sit. For me, it’s the localization program manager. It means a native-level experience for our users, whichever language of our product they choose to use.

 

That means when talking to suppliers and translators, we try to immerse them in the ethos as well. Help them understand who we are, who our customers are, what role those customers are fulfilling, whether it’s travelers or bookers or admins, and make sure we’re hitting the right notes with the language. The challenge for linguists, of course, is that they don’t get to see these days the kind of huge chunks of content that I was talking about back in the early days when I was at Canon, at least from a product UI perspective. Very often, it’s a drop of 10 or 15 UI strings in a TMS with limited context. We ask a lot of our linguists to be able to hit the right marks, engage with them, being able to answer questions, provide access to sandbox environments and so on. That’s really key.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

While translation is a major part of the localization process, presentation layer or the thing that brings translation images and everything else together is as important, if not more. Do you feel that building a seamless integration between the translation or the language output and the presentation delivery, as well as the overall user experience, which also includes the hardware on which it’s displayed and so forth, is that sufficient for content to feel native?

 

Simon Mitton

It’s certainly really important to have all of those pieces working together. I’ve been around long enough to remember what things were like before responsive web development provided the ability for apps and content to react to the device on which it’s being consumed. So, again, the pace of change is relentless. The concept of native feel certainly applies as much to the methods of consumption as it does to the language. So it’s important all of these elements hang together.

 

How this factor’s into the translation process comes back to how we try to create that level of engagement between the product and the translators. Understanding the features and services, but also how is that content being delivered and how is it being consumed? It’s vital as a client that we provide that information to linguists. It’s the information they need to be able to do the job we’re asking them to do. And I guess on the other side of that partnership, the key skill for the translators is understanding that information and knowing what that information means for the content they’re working on.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Simon, let’s bring in technology to this discussion. Besides TMS, what else is propelling a better user experience for localized content when it comes to technology?

 

Simon Mitton

I think the general move towards integrated solutions will continue to accelerate, particularly as AI-enabled processes become even more prevalent. The data that underpins MT and AI solutions is vital. So having the localization function embedded within an organization plays an important part in making sure that access to content and data, both for decision making and for linguistic purposes becomes an enabler rather than a blocker. A great example of this is something like customer care. Help FAQs and documentation are still really useful as static repositories.

 

But the development of services like multilingual chat, AI triaging of support cases and support tickets offers huge possibilities. Take the situation here at Travelperk. When we start talking about which markets, we want to expand into, we have to be mindful of the impact on customer care. Are we accessing an entirely new demographic who will expect us to be able to respond to customer service issues in that new language, not just serve the product? And how do we do that in a cost-effective way, in an efficient, scalable way?

 

It would be virtually impossible to offer native language customer care agents for every market. So we have to factor in what that means for the prospective customer experience. If you can harness an AI powered triage system that can take a customer query, pull relevant answers from a help center database, that sort of stuff cuts contact ratios. And for situations that can’t be answered in that way, the ability to live translate a chat function can turn any of our customer care agents who are already the superstars of this kind of business, into a multilingual agent capable of helping any of our customers, regardless of the language combination that the agent and customer bring together.

 

We’re still early in our localization journey here, but this is certainly an exciting area. We see these emerging technologies making a real difference to our customer experience.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

With digital transformation, every business today wants the digital play to engage their customers across a variety of channels, digital channels, that is. What does it mean to them to be localization ready and mature?

 

Simon Mitton

The interesting challenge that we have here is how to scale in different markets. We have a very active social media team. But with a comparatively smaller following in different regions. We don’t do a lot of localization work for those channels. The engagement there is more difficult to achieve. We’ll get a much bigger return in our investments in these areas from the core English offering. That may well change as we continue to grow. But as I mentioned before, we operate in a market where English adoption is very high.

 

So, there might be a point in the future where those changes. And I think at that time, it’s an area that would certainly benefit from a more tailored approach, targeted campaigns, social campaigns that only run in specific markets that are relevant locally, aimed at driving engagement within that market. I think that’s one of the areas that will certainly benefit from this kind of move away from a centrally driven campaign.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

When it comes to customers, Simon, they have a short attention span today, like the rest of us. How can localization keep them engaged in your content for longer?

 

Simon Mitton

Yeah, if I could answer that, I think I’d do a much better job with my kids. But yes, just having the content available in a consumer’s native language automatically gives you a boost to that attention. The harder you have to work at consuming content, the more effort it takes. And the more difficult it becomes, the more likely it is that it’s going to be a blocker. And even the content in the language in which it’s created, getting your hooks in early is always beneficial. Get to the point and make that point relevant, and that will keep people engaged.

 

So, in terms of localization, it’s not just about the translation. It’s also about being locally relevant. You can provide the best translation of pitch tech that you could possibly imagine. But if the central theme doesn’t apply, it’s not going to land. So that’s crucial.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Simon, can you talk about how localization as an enabler helps the company accomplish its targets? Obviously, every organization wants to see growth, as you mentioned. Where does localization fit into that picture?

 

Simon Mitton

Generally speaking, I think localization has always been seen as a keyway of taking your product into new markets and reaching wider audiences. If you wanted to play globally, you had to be able to deliver your product to users in a way that makes it easy for them to adapt. In some cases, of course, having localization and translated materials in place isn’t just desirable. It’s essential for compliance or regulation purposes. You simply can’t enter markets without it.

 

One of the things I’m finding really interesting about my current role is that business travel has nuances that you don’t find in every industry. Obviously, every industry has its own unique features. But leaving aside the sheer scale of the opportunity where the business travel market is valued, depending on which figure you read, upwards of a trillion dollars globally, our largest markets outside of those that we currently localize into are regions where English adoption and proficiency is really high. So the time and cost investment in those areas may not actually generate much of an uplift in the number of customers we win in those regions.

 

Perhaps we’d see better results if we invested in other areas. Localization isn’t just about translation. In our business, translating the product’s UI isn’t enough. The user experience of our product depends as much on the inventory that we can offer as the product’s UI itself. We can have the best UI experience in the world but if our customers can’t book the trains or hotels they need in their region, we’re not bringing them any value.

 

So, at Travelperk, we talk about localization in terms of breadth and depth. Depth is how tailored that experience is, making sure our customers in each region and in each locale are seeing exactly what they would expect from a native product. So simple things like units of measure right up to individual loyalty schemes. So that depth of localization in each market is an important factor for us, as much as the breadth of the number of languages that we cover.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Given the sheer number of languages you just referred to, different dialects and so on, organizations may have to outsource part or all of their localization activities to LSPs, which has been the traditional way of actually running localization efforts. What is the difference between an in-house generated localization versus outsourced output when it comes to client engagement? Do they notice a difference between the in-house teams? Is that ultimately a team that’s more familiar with the product and content versus one that’s outsourced and probably provides localization to a variety of different customers and industries?

 

Simon Mitton

Yeah, that’s definitely a challenge. And I think it’s greatly impacted by the scale that you’re working on. So, some organizations that I’ve worked with over the last 25 years have had enough content constantly in production to justify the overheads of employed full-time in-house linguists. And it’s certainly a lot easier to embed those employees deeply in the content and the ethos and the personality of the organization. I’m not sure how common that is anymore. For a startup like Travelperk, the company has been in hyper growth mode, at least since 2020, when obviously business travel looked very different. And we’ve gone through the transition from using freelance linguists to an LSP model in order to formalize the process, reduce turnaround times, minimizing gaps in the products, which is constantly being updated. We have new feature releases being launched multiple times a day.

 

So, part of my role in that process is to try and drive that engagement with the LSPs, telling the company story during RFP processes and onboarding, giving people access to sandboxes, terminology lists, and being open and available to field queries from translators as much as possible. It’s a little bit of a cliché, but I want partnerships with LSPs to feel like an extension of the internal team. And that’s certainly how I’ve seen relationships work best when I’ve been on the LSP side. If you have that feeling of being part of the team, it’s going to help everybody push into the same goal.

 

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Sultan Ghaznawi

When it comes to user experience, Simon, customers are familiar with content adaptation for their various devices and screens, we referred to this briefly earlier. Does localization address adaptation of such content effectively today to drive engagement across all of those channels?

 

Simon Mitton

I think in this case; localization is an extension of the UX design process. In the past, it was very often the case that localization was the last thought on anyone’s mind. Products and features could go right the way through the development cycle before the question, should we translate this? Or if it was even considered. Still, something that can happen from time to time today, but I think there’s generally more awareness earlier on in the cycle. So those kinds of delivery issues are generally addressed earlier in the process.

 

There are always some fundamentals that don’t change, text expansion, language direction, and so on. The variety of devices that consume that content adds to that challenge now. There are so many more ways that that content is going to get consumed. There’s just so much more to be aware of. So, it’s super important.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let’s talk about the notion of culture adaptation. Certain cultural norms don’t really exist in foreign markets. These concepts have not been defined or they haven’t been exposed to. Without going into specifics, how would you drive engagement through localization that would appeal to the target demographics in lieu of using concepts that drive massive engagement in home or another market?

 

Simon Mitton

If the core message that you’re trying to convey is something that applies to the whole target audience, maybe it’s product functionality, new features, promotions. Those are the elements that have to be clear and engaging to the whole demographic, whether that be existing customers or an audience that you’re trying to reach for the first time. In this case, the role of localization is to take those themes and make them relevant for target locales. And in doing that, cultural adaptation is hugely important. It’s a really interesting challenge.

 

Creating content that appeals to consumers in every market is really difficult. It’s really difficult because to be able to land it, you have to be able to connect in a meaningful way with that audience. And that can be difficult enough to do within a single market, let alone playing across multiple countries and cultures. Typically, that’s where we’d be looking to give our linguists more creative freedom, not just to tailor the language, but also ensure imagery, color schemes, the more visual elements are also reviewed and appropriate for the target market.

 

Of course, some features are going to be of more interest to users in different markets. Loyalty programs, for example, are a big deal to some of our markets, more so than to others. Adding new support for those might be a critical thing for some clients and just not of interest to others. Knowing and understanding that demographic and making sure those important areas land in the right way is essential. And for that to be done in a way that’s culturally sensitive is really important.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

How do you see the future of a customer engagement landscape through localization as we look into the next five years, in the context of things such as generative AI and so on?

 

Simon Mitton

I think the advances that we’ve seen in AI in the last year have changed again. In all sorts of disciplines. I think localization is no exception. The technology has been integrated into many areas of our work here, including our design teams and our engineering teams. The capabilities it offers for language work are intriguing. But as with any technology, I think how we harness it is important.

 

I think where this will be really interesting is, along the lines of what we’ve already discussed around translation versus content creation. The capability generative AI brings to target language creation is really interesting. And that may be where the greatest gains can be made. Although we’re actively looking into how we can use the combination of AI and MT to power all of our processes here.

 

I’m sure we’ll see the same thing happen with AI as we did with machine translation years ago. It goes from being a disrupter or something that was saved for specific activities or specific types of content, to the point where it becomes an everyday asset. It certainly appears that the pace of change will be greater. It certainly seems to be the case with what we have seen from general AI models over the course of this year. So, there is definitely scope for technology to redefine the industry again, particularly when we reach the point where general models can be customizable enough to capture the nuance that we strive for when we’re considering making our creative content unique to our company and our product.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Simon, as we reach the closing of this conversation, what are your thoughts and advice for other localization managers and the industry at large for driving engagement through localization?

 

Simon Mitton

I believe that the key is to keep your customers at the heart of what you do. It sounds obvious, but it drives everything we do here from research, through design, implementation and customer care. From a product perspective, we invest a lot of time from a lot of very talented people in making sure the base processes work in ways that people enjoy interacting with.

 

As mentioned at the start, our mission is not just to connect people in real life. It’s to connect people in real life in an enjoyable and sustainable way. And that enjoyment element is important. It’s part of the reason that we embed the localization function with the design team. We have to remember the reason why we’re investing in localization. The languages we localize into at the moment are currently a strategic decision, rather than being something that’s a requirement or that’s dictated by outside influence.

 

So, our aim is to provide that experience, the seven-star experience, for our users and for the markets we currently support. The localization function is about supporting that with the best language experience we can provide. Outside of the functional product experience, whether it be sales and marketing, customer care, however else customers engage with us.

 

Effective localization means making sure the customers understand the service we provide and how it solves the challenges that they’re facing. It’s up to us to make sure that the content we serve takes account of how those challenges might change from locale to locale. We’ve got to build that trust with them that we have solutions that will successfully address their needs. I think if you can see your product and service through the lens of your consumer, you’re going to be on the right track.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

What a fascinating and interesting conversation, Simon. I really enjoyed speaking with you about your experience, localization in general, and how localization plays a role in the travel and hospitality industry. There’s so much more to learn from you, and I’m hoping we can continue this conversation in our future episodes. And with that, thank you for your time and for sharing your knowledge and experience with us today.

 

Simon Mitton

Thanks very much, Sultan. It was great to speak to you.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Okay, it’s time for my roundup of the interview and my analysis as to what has been discussed. Simon covered a very important yet overlooked aspect of our industry and how we contribute to business growth. Customer engagement is forefront for any product and user experience unit of a business, but not many people talk about it in the context of localization.

 

I think localization is a very important and key component of customer experience which keeps them engaged. There is a well-known saying in our industry which goes, “can’t read, won’t buy”. How would you keep your customers engaged with your product, service, or content when they can’t read or understand it? I think enterprises have realized that in order to keep customers from all their target demographics engaged, they must present the content not just in their language but also based on their cultural preferences and norms.

 

Simon is leading this effort in his organization, and we need to discuss customer centricity in more detail in our language and foreign conversations. My friend in the industry and colleague, Christophe Djouani is a big performer of driving customer engagement through localization, by placing the customer at the center of everything. You may want to listen to his conversation with me on a previous episode of this podcast.

 

That brings us to the end of this episode. I hope you liked it. There is a lot of value in what Simon shared with us today. If you agree, think about it and see if your organization can benefit from his ideas and thoughts. Maybe share your thoughts with a comment. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Translation Company Talk Podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or your platform of choice and give this episode a good rating. Until next time.

 

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The views and opinions expressed in this podcast episode are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Hybrid Lynx.

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