Businesses have long known they must translate their websites to effectively engage and serve customers in global markets. But they often forget that the customer journey doesn't end there.
For instance, most neglect the secure, personalised website experiences provided by portal websites. These digital experiences, though hidden from public view, provide a critical path to delivering terrific experiences to your customers in new markets.
How Portal Websites Affect the Overall Customer Experience
Let's say you've translated your public website, and it's making an impact in global markets. What happens after those global customers sign up for your services and products?
Ideally, your digital customer experience extends to secure areas that require logins, or display personalised information. These can include:
- Private “My Account” pages for customers
- Inventory management systems (PIMs)
- Company employee content for training and human resources
- Secure sites for distributors or affiliates
Portal websites gather and consolidate this information from various sources such as emails, online forums and search engines to provide personalised customer support experiences. They're vital for nearly any company, operating in any market.
Why Translate Portal Sites?
Imagine the disconnect that would happen if global customers came to your localised website, signed into its customer portal-and discovered their personal account information wasn't translated. It’s in a language they couldn’t read. They can’t navigate their own information.
That sinks your brand credibility, fast. Untranslated portal sites can quickly lead to additional, more costly, problems. If your customer-support content isn't localised, your users can't easily handle common self-service situations such as updating addresses, locating product information or verifying account details.
When they can't handle these issues on their own, they'll turn to your customer service department. You'll need to add more team members-and these new employees must speak your customers' preferred languages. That increases your organisational challenges, headcount and costs.
Untranslated portal sites can quickly lead to additional, more costly, problems.
Great Translation Solutions Can Localize Portal Sites
Turn-key, proxy-based website translation solutions can make localising portal sites a simple, cost-efficient, smooth and secure process. These approaches operate independently of your CMS, so they don't require costly changes to your back-end technology. Security is airtight, too.
Consider these advantages:
Ease of Translation
The best vendors use a translation memory database that can maximise the value of existing translations. Clever technologies automatically populate your previously-translated content anywhere it might appear on your website—including your portal site. These translations are published at no additional cost to you.
Customised Implementation
Your portal site probably accommodates different account types and customer profiles-such as basic memberships vs. premier memberships. These memberships may have completely unique content, requiring different levels of translation. The best solutions can support such needs at any level of customisation.
Secure, Private Connections
Your portal site’s customer account pages are undoubtedly accessed via a secure HTTPS connection—but that doesn’t mean they can’t be translated. Great technologies ensure that all private information is protected, even as other content is translated. That’s because the proxy technology interacts with your site but doesn’t become a part of your site. The vendor doesn’t have access to, or store, any of your customers’ personally-identifiable information.
Budget-Friendly
Since a proxy approach can handle secure and public areas of a website-including customer data forms, dynamic PDFs, instructional videos and other multimedia-there's no need to hire separate vendors or add to your in-house IT and customer service teams to handle extra workloads. This reduces complexity and costs.
There’s also no need to make costly changes to your CMS, because the best proxy technologies are completely compatible with any back-end tech you’re using now—and will use in the future.
Positive Customer Experience
Finally, the best vendors have translators who are experts in the industries they translate for, and are well-versed in any technical terminology you might need. And since they're fluent in both the languages they translate and the cultures of the markets you're targeting, they create localised, authentic content that resonates with consumers.
That ensures an excellent customer journey, from beginning to end.
Conclusion
The best option for your company is to find a vendor that can offer a fully turn-key, proxy translation solution that makes it effortless and cost-efficient to translate your portal site—without compromising security, privacy or the customer experience.
Last updated on June 14, 2018
