Website Globalized? Don’t Forget about Incoming Requests

Your brand spanking new Web site is ready to go live in a dozen foreign markets. You spent countless hours deciding which markets matter the most. You labored to align your brand strategy and image across all 12 sites. You asked the IT guys to turn on all the foreign-language support in the software that you use to manage your web presence. One of your new sites is aimed at Spanish-speakers in the United States; the others are meant for prospects in Europe and Asia.

You review your task list. All sites translated? Check. Functional testing? Done. How about linguistic review by native speakers in each country? Complete. Have you globalized the payment and shipment systems? Yes, thanks to the help of UPS and global payment aggregators like CyberSource and PayByCash (click here for an introduction to international payment aggregators.

But hold on a second. How about a process for responding to foreign-language e-mails and phone calls? And what will you do for after-sales support in those other markets? Whoops. You’ve created the mechanisms for marketing your products around the world. However, you haven’t figured out how to interact with people who haven’t decided to buy yet – or who have bought something and now need some help.

When you reach out to global prospects on the web, you should expect to hear from people both by e-mail and by phone. That is, you should anticipate an ongoing need to communicate with them if your offer meets their needs. From our research at Common Sense Advisory, we’ve reviewed the ways in which companies can respond to inquiries – Web forms, e-mails, and phone calls.

First off, there are Web forms, a great way to structure an online exchange. Web forms let companies ask correspondents for exactly the information they need to answer a question. Online forms typically request name, e-mail address, and perhaps the phone number of the person making an inquiry. They typically provide a pull-down menu that helps the visitor categorize the issue about which they are writing. This self-taxonomy allows the company to automatically route the message to the appropriate department or customer service representative.

An online form works pretty well for your English-speaking visitors, but unless it’s translated and localized, people who don’t read English will have a tough time completing it. For example, can they input their name and address? The absence of diacritical marks for some European languages, or even different writing systems such as Arabic, Chinese or Cyrillic will keep some prospects from completing the form. Unless they know how to transliterate, they won’t be able to submit the form. Will their postal codes or phone numbers fit in the U.S. format? How about day-date formats? All of these are potential traps for the non-American filling out a U.S. company’s web form.

What should you do if someone who doesn’t speak English overcomes all these obstacles and manages to complete your online form? Consider yourself lucky – this person sounds like he really wants find out something from you. If you want that business, you’re going to have to figure out how to answer his questions. Read on.

Free-form e-mails pose another set of problems, the most obvious being language. Faced with a message written in another language, will your customer care center even know which language it was written in, much less be able to respond to it? In two research studies that I’ve conducted measuring responses by U.S. companies to Spanish-language inquiries, I found wide variation in among companies in their ability or even tendency to answer such e-mails. Some responded in English (“English please! Thank you” remains my all-time favorite). Other well-meaning firms turned to free machine translation like Babel Fish or Google Translate for literal but silly-sounding answers. Just a few distinguished themselves with native-speaker replies that fully addressed the concerns expressed in the e-mail.

Given the population mix in the United States, there’s a good chance that someone in your company speaks Spanish – and some firms employ Spanish-speakers in their call centers. But what about the other 11 languages that your newly globalized Web sites support? That’s where you’ll have to make some real investments. At the risk of over-simplifying the effort, you need to spend time on a few things: 1) figuring out which language the message is in, 2) replying in that language, and 3) following up on whatever actions are required.

Until you determine the volume of foreign-language inquiries, for most companies the best approach will be to use a translation agency or specialty marketing firm to manage these non-English requests for information. As volume in a given language increases, you might consider hiring speakers of that language in your response center. As I work with companies on setting up processes for handling such inquiries, I often find the outsourcing route to be the most cost-effective.

Finally, there’s question of the foreign-language phone call that pops up in your call center. Many Americans are already accustomed to “press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish” when they call an airline or a bank. What happens when you press “2” depends on the company.

Some firms send you directly to a Spanish-speaking operator, others put you into IVR purgatory, and still others conference in a telephone interpretation service such as Language Line Services, Language Service Associates, and Pacific Interpreters. These same services can enable you to communicate with prospective customers in up to 200 languages. The services are available around the clock, and connection times are usually only a matter of seconds. This third-party service model is popular in industries such as health care, finance, insurance, and utilities.

How about dealing with e-mails and calls for after-the-sale support? That’s another set of issues, but whatever you do in dealing with marketing and sales inquiries will be good practice for that next set of challenges.

Don DePalma is the founder and chief research officer of the research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory.