Creating Content That Improves CX: A Q&A with Lionbridge & Aprimo

A version of this piece was originally posted on Aprimo's blog and is re-posted here with permission.

Today's brands face numerous challenges. They need to create a customized, excellent experience for each and every customer worldwide. To do that, they need to create high-quality, on-target content. They need to create that content quickly, effectively, and for audiences who speak multiple languages.

How can brands overcome some of these challenges? In this Q&A, we're teaming up with our friends from Aprimo to dive into that topic.

Meet the Experts

Arnie Koh is the Senior Director of Global Offerings at Lionbridge. He works closely with the company’s channel partners to help them achieve their global objectives.

Claire Goodswen is the Senior Director of North American Solutions at Lionbridge. She helps build and deploy successful multilingual solutions that truly resonate for a diverse group of industry-leading companies.

David Schweer is a Director of Product Marketing for Aprimo focusing on solution positioning, field enablement, and managing release information for the Aprimo platform. He has held various roles in Solution Consulting, Product Marketing, and R&D for London-based SDL, plc, Teradata, and Prysm. David received his MBA from Butler University and is based in Indianapolis, IN.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge facing global brands today?

David: Customer experience, and content to support that experience. We all know that companies are going to compete on customer experience. What we also know from Gartner is that the ability to create content to support that experience is going to be the bottleneck 90% of the time.

Arnie: Exactly. Content is the main bottleneck for global brands. Today’s companies need to figure out how they can simplify the content creation process, so they can unplug that bottleneck and engage with customers in more places, more quickly. Doing so is a strategic advantage in today’s competitive marketplace.

Q: How are you helping brands overcome that challenge?

David: Aprimo helps relieve that bottleneck by optimizing your people resources and budget resources. Then, we help you figure out how to create, distribute, and manage your content in market.

Arnie: Lionbridge provides end-to-end content services for companies that want to interact with more customers in more places and more languages. We can help create content, but we also help transform it—whether through translation and localization, through SEO optimization, through transcreation, etc.—so it really resonates when it reaches the end user. That ladders back to creating an amazing customer experience, anywhere in the world.

Q: In your view, what constitutes a “good” customer experience?

David: Many things, but above all consistency. At Aprimo, we have a very content-centric view of the world. We see so many opportunities for content creation on downstream channels—that’s web, t hat’s social, that’s offline, that’s things like customer care, customer support. These are all channels that require content and require a consistent experience. When brands don’t deliver a consistent experience across channels and media, customers get frustrated, and brand loyalty dips.

And it’s important to note that customer experiences don’t stop at borders. They don’t stop at languages. You have a brand that goes across the world. And you need to meet a customer with the best, most optimized content that they prefer—not that you’d like them to prefer, but that they actually prefer. Getting that right and delivering that preferred content to ensure a good customer experience takes a lot of internal planning and coordination, and that’s what we’re focused on solving.

Arnie/Claire: Relevance and personalization. When content is relevant, customers will consume it.  The concept of personalization has been around for years—and more and more online content is tailored to users based on their online behavior and previous “clicks.”

We believe that the first step in personalization is language and culture.  If you are delivering content to your customers in foreign markets, you want it to be meaningful and relevant—and that means delivering culturally sensitive content in-language. It’s critical to consider your customers’ various language preferences and cultural nuances.

Q: How can brands juggle the need for high-quality content that delivers a consistent experience with the demand for more content in more languages more quickly?

Arnie: Today, it’s all about speed. Selecting the right partners and technology solutions can help address the universal need for speed. That’s a feature of our partnership with Aprimo. We have focused on optimizing the global content management process to drive marketing productivity and efficiency. That’s what helps us break up the content bottleneck that’s keeping companies from delivering positive experiences for their customers.

Claire: We’re seeing customers diversify their content. Today, vast amounts of different types of content are run through automation. Then, content is being pushed into two separate categories. Some is being treated with a great deal of care—this is nuanced, this is special, this is brand. But the sheer volume of content and the sheer number of markets being reached means that some content just cannot be processed that way. And that’s where there’s a diversification.

Q: How do you encourage companies to think about global audiences from the beginning of the content creation process?

David: We know it’s best practice to think globally first. How do you do that? It works well with us, because we have a deep planning capability—not only for capturing the strategy and the theory, but also for aligning resources and budgets across the globe.

Claire: The global marketplace has expanded. Companies today reach much further, and making content effective for multiple audiences across multiple channels is a question of more than translation. We encourage companies to consider the purpose of their content and decide how it should be treated before they create it. Automation, AI, and MT are needed to handle the sheer volume of content we’re seeing today. Then, companies can separate the most impactful content, which can deliver real experience and nuance. We work with companies to deliver real creativity with this content, through services such as transcreation.

Q: How do Lionbridge and Aprimo work together to help companies deliver a leading customer experience?

Lionbridge and Aprimo have partnered to deliver a global solution to enhance marketing productivity and digital asset management.  Leveraging our joint solution, customers can streamline their global content creation process, increase customer experience, and reduce time to market.

Interested in learning more? Reach out today for more information on how our partnership can help you.