Your multilingual and international customers rightfully expect to be served in their preferred languages—especially online.
But if you're trying to engage them with a localised experience that doesn't include your secure login areas, you're missing a critical CX element that may make them stop being customers altogether.
Secure portals play a vital role in the customer experience:
- They provide self-service support resources that help customers solve problems quickly
- They present up-to-date content and time-sensitive announcements in a centralised place
- They create opportunities for cross-sell and upsell transactions
- Depending on the industry, they offer management tools for user accounts, wealth management, private patient information, product tracking and returns, and more
Here's why localising your secure portals can dramatically improve your CX and generate more engagement, conversions and credibility among new and repeat customers.
The Opportunity Costs are Real
Offering multilingual users a localised buyer's journey can dramatically improve engagement and conversions. But neglecting to localize their post-conversion customer journey sabotages all that effort.
For instance: If customers can’t understand the contents of their secure account-management pages, they won’t reap the benefits of further engagement or transaction opportunities—and neither will your company.
Reduces International Customer Service Costs
When multilingual customers can't find support and account information in their preferred languages, they turn to Customer Service departments for help. This can dramatically increase the number of support requests. Mitigating this growing workload requires hiring more bilingual Customer Service employees, which significantly increases personnel and support costs.
Localising portals eliminates most of these operational complexities and resource demands.
Improves Customer Engagement in New Markets
Many portals use complex web applications-often powered by Angular, React and other frameworks-or leverage AJAX calls to dynamically present personalised content to users in real-time.
These technologies create unique experiences that dramatically increase customer on-site engagement and interaction. They also enable customers to instantly compare different products and services, make informed decisions about their accounts, manage payments and more.
Translating these experiences for multilingual customers ensures you're delivering a CX that's just as good as your origin portal's, and offering the same robust (and often revenue-boosting) capabilities. Your customers don't just deserve that stellar experience-they expect it.
Creates Untapped Cross-Sell and Upsell Opportunities
Localising your customer portal also enables you to apply successful sales approaches that you've already perfected on your origin-language portal (which serves your primary market).
Your organisation already understands the business goals of its primary-market customers; your new multilingual customers have similar, if not identical, needs. A localised portal provides a new, differentiated ecosystem to increase lifetime value with cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
In addition, the unique user behavior and transactional trends you collect via a translated portal provides intelligence that can be leveraged in the long term—and even inform the creation of specialized offerings for certain markets.
Reaches Multilingual Customers In the Channels They Prefer
Global smartphone and tablet adoption continues to skyrocket, especially in international markets where many buyers are either mobile-first or mobile-exclusive. You can capitalise on this phenomenon by localising your mobile portal and smartphone portal apps.
This provides your mobile-first customers with a satisfying "always on" user experience. It also enables you to more effectively track mobile customer engagement, adapt to usage trends, and-with properly optimised content and capabilities-differentiate your offerings from less mobile-savvy competitors.
Empowers You to ‘Sell Like a Local’
You can further improve conversion rates by leveraging localizations within your translated portal. Localizations are authentic, locally-resonant words and phrases that relate to local customs, culture and buying habits. You can create promotions timed to regionally relevant holidays and celebrations, too.
These “speak like a local” translations build brand credibility and trust, and improve conversions.
Generates Goodwill Among New Customers
Given the choice, customers always prefer to buy from a brand that values them. Offering a localised customer experience-one that's just as powerful, persuasive and authentic as the ones you offer to your primary market-indicates that you are committed to them, and that your intentions aren't purely opportunistic.
Conclusion
Localising your secure portals is an optimal way to help ensure that your multilingual and international customers become faithful repeat buyers.
But translating portal experiences is very challenging; it generates much more on-going technical and operational work than most people realise. This is because many of the compelling capabilities of portals are powered by very complex technologies and frameworks.
Detecting, compiling and localising the translatable content embedded within this complicated code is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, for in-house teams and nearly all translation vendors to localize. They often fail to detect all-or even most-of a portal's content. Functionality issues often arise, too.
Sidestep this risk by finding a great website translation services that can help you implement these customer-friendly best practices—and help supercharge your global expansion efforts, both in the short- and long-term.
Last updated on January 22, 2020
