Globalizing E-support: Avoiding the headaches, reaping the rewards

Call Center CRM Solutions, Nov 2000 by Teague, Katrina

When you compare the costs between supporting customers via a call center and via the Web, it's clear why so many companies have adopted e-support strategies to slow escalating support costs. Fully loaded, it can cost your business $30, $50 or more for call center staff to answer the phone. If your customer seeks self-help by logging onto your Web site, the cost can drop significantly, to less than $5 per incident. At General Electric, where the Consumer Appliances business alone fields more than 20 million sales and support inquiries a year, CIO Gary Reiner foresees cost reductions of more than 50 percent by moving support from the phone to the Web.

But dramatic savings aren't the only driving force behind this changing mode of support. Increased customer satisfaction is key. Customers like the empowerment, the single point of contact and the opportunity for instantaneous resolution 'round-the-clock.

Until now, most companies have provided electronic support in English only. But global customers are escalating their demand for e-support in their own languages. Just as they prefer conversing in their native language when receiving support over the telephone, customers want frequently asked questions (FAQs) and knowledge base articles in their native languages as well.

Just how significant is this demand? International Data Corporation projects that by 2001 at least 60 percent of Web users will be coming from outside the United States. Studies by U.K. research firm Equip indicate that a significant portion of those Web users in European and Pacific Rim business communities will be unable to cope with the English language on the Internet. These same studies show that productivity suffers when Internet users are forced to work with untranslated information. In short, your non-U.S. customers prefer speaking, reading, using software and troubleshooting problems in languages other than English. If your market demographics indicate that a growing percentage of your customers live outside the United States, your company will need to globalize its e-support.

Tackle Globalization With Ex erts At Your Side

When you begin the process of globalizing your e-support site, don't let the sheer complexity of the task discourage you. Successful globalization programs start with a well-defined process. More important, do not try to do it alone. Select a business partner with the expertise in critical areas such as internationalization engineering, localization, connectivity, workflow and language management to help you make it work.

Start With The Elements Of Your E-Support Site

The globalization of your e-support site will need to be addressed at three levels: 1) the user interface (UI) to the support site; 2) e-support applications running on the site; and 3) the underlying content. Each of these three elements must be evaluated for internationalization, meaning each one's ability to handle languages other than English, especially 16-bit Asian character sets.

Any modifications you make to your site to accommodate globalization must take place at the source code level. Architecturally, you do not want to create multiple versions of source code because maintenance will become complicated and expensive.

The User Interface:

Does Your User Interface Support English Only?

The ideal user interface is one that is available in the user's preferred language. While language choice will eventually be handled by content negotiation between the user's client and your server, it is still far from reliable, which is why Web sites use manual options for language selection.

The flag was initially the most commonly used symbol for language selection, but that has changed. Companies now realize that some languages (e.g., German) are spoken in many countries while in some countries (e.g., Switzerland) many languages are spoken and for purposes of e-commerce in particular, knowing where users reside is essential. There are a few options for implementing a language choice: having a language menu on the home page (probably the most common nowadays), having a language menu on all subsequent pages (if the user enters through a URL other than the home page) or using a staging page (which takes the user through an extra page to designate language choice). Of course, once language selection is defined, the UI itself must support the character sets of those preferred languages. It will do little good to implement a language menu and/or store Japanese data if there is no way to view the information properly. Similarly, the architecture of your site needs to accommodate multiple language versions of the data. Internationalization and localization is key in designing your Web site to meet the UI requirements of your global market.

The E-Support Applications: Does Your Search Engine Recognize English Strings Only?

There are a host of knowledge base platforms on the market that were originally developed to support English content. This was adequate for English-speaking customers seeking esupport, as the search engines were designed to seek out English language strings. But when you create and maintain localized versions of your knowledge base, your search engines must be adapted to recognize non-English character strings and search multiple multilingual databases. Otherwise, the results of any search will be unreliable, either returning inappropriate answers or returning no answers at all.