When companies engage new markets, they often translate their public websites and omnichannel content for international buyers. But few localize their secure digital experiences to support customers, employees and business partners.
These secure login areas—also known by terms such as “online portals,” “record-keeping platforms” and others—play instrumental roles in the customer journey and customer engagement.
Translating them ensures that the localised customer journey matches the localised buyer's journey, which will provide a seamless user experience for a company's most valued international constituents. This helps increase brand loyalty, conversions and employee retention.
The Stakes
These important secure-and often highly personalised-portal experiences include:
- Private “My Account” sections for customers
- Content for employee training and human resources
- Informational content for distributors and resellers
- Educational experiences that help customers upgrade financial investments, healthcare plans and more
Neglecting to localize these experiences severely disrupts the post-conversion stages of the customer journey. It also generates unexpected risk, stress and costs.
Here's why. Imagine effortlessly transacting on your favourite e-commerce website, signing into a secure "My Account" experience, and discovering that your account information and order history are in a language you can't read. This completely derails the customer experience.
The Case for Localisation
In fact, untranslated portal experiences can lead to even more—and more costly—problems.
For instance: When global customers can’t find support and account information in their preferred languages, they turn to Customer Service departments for help.
This generates an on-going increase in international support requests, which pushes many operational burdens onto Customer Service teams. Mitigating this greater workload requires hiring more bilingual employees, which significantly increases personnel and support costs.
Alternately, a company can hire a customer support vendor to offset the operational burden, but this comes with its own costs and risks—namely, entrusting a third party to efficiently and effectively manage and solve support requests.
Another concern: Many companies continually update their support sites with information on new products and models, software patches, installation guides, repair documentation, user manuals and more. Localising this important content is hard to do at the speed online customers need.
Most translation vendor teams take weeks to translate this content, which means most localised portals don't offer seamless in-language experiences like they should. Instead, they present awkward, amateurish "mixed language" user experiences, which confuse and frustrate international constituents. Research indicates many customers don't trust sites that aren't fully localised.
Another example: Companies also provide secure digital experiences that provide vital information and assistance to their employees. This includes internal communications, training, payroll information and more. When companies employ talent around the world, it’s vital to localize these experiences.
Ultimately, neglecting portal translation discourages global customers and employees from trusting-or engaging with-international companies. That's bad for any brand.
Indeed, localising portal sites for global constituents is often a cheaper, more efficient alternative to the opportunity costs generated by not localising them.
Localising Portals for All Markets
Due to the manual effort and complicated workflows involved, using traditional approaches to localize portal experiences is time-consuming, expensive and sometimes downright impossible. However, breakthrough solutions powered by proxy-based technologies eliminate most of the cost—and nearly all of the IT development—required to translate portal content.
The best vendors offer additional differentiators such as:
Easy, Budget-Friendly Translation
Great vendors combine leading content-detection technology with translation memory, a database that stores all translations associated with a digital localisation project. These translations can be applied to portal experiences.
Once stored in translation memory, a localised phrase can be published hundreds-or thousands-of times at no additional cost. Re-using these translations over and over … even months or years later … saves on localisation costs and eliminates duplicate effort.
Technology Independence
Modern localisation approaches can translate any online-based content-including content on secure portal sites-without directly integrating with a CMS or other back-end technology. They seamlessly accommodate future technologies, too.
Flexible proxy-based solutions can translate, deploy and continually operate multilingual portals, while also perfectly preserving their functionality. Leading solutions can do this with no on-going effort required from their customers, too.
Single-Page Applications and Dynamic Content
Many secure login experiences can apply elaborate calculations to dynamically answer "What if?" scenarios posed by users, such as computing the costs associated with adding insurance options, or the benefits of increasing a financial investment. These complex applications are often powered by JavaScript or AJAX.
Traditional solutions can’t parse or translate these applications with any reliability.
Leading proxy-based solutions can parse translatable text from applications while preserving their JavaScript framework logic. After translation, they elegantly reintegrate the localised content back into the applications, too.
This technology also works seamlessly with AJAX calls that produce dynamic content that would not be seen "on the page" and fed through either JSON or XML. Superior solutions also have JSON and XML parsers that enable customers to select content elements that must be processed for translation, while allowing other text to simply pass through as untranslated.
Secure, Private Connections
Great solutions also ensure the privacy of customers, partners and employees. Proxy solutions don't have access to, or store, any of your customers' personally-identifiable information. They also support industry-recommended methods that rely on secure encryption protocols for transmitting data on your behalf.
Reputable vendors are also compliant with PCI DSS, HIPAA and other data protection standards. To ensure they comply with data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the European Union and Switzerland to the United States, make sure they're a Privacy Shield Certified Organisation, too.
Conclusion
Serving global customers starts with creating engaging, localised user experiences in the languages they prefer. But only a fully translated customer experience—including your secure login experiences—will deliver the kind of seamless CX required to keep customers fully engaged.
Translating this content doesn't have to be complicated, expensive or put your sensitive data at risk. Be sure to partner with a vendor that can offer a fully turn-key proxy solution that makes it effortless, cost-efficient and secure to localize your secure portal experiences.
Last updated on September 04, 2019
