If you're not already a global business with a Web presence, be
aware that times they are a-changing. Peter Guthrie warns against
burying your head
What has the Web ever done for us? Let us speak to our customers
24 hours a day?Okay, apart from that, what has the Web done for us?
Gain customers more cost effectively?Okay, apart from letting us
speak to customers whenever it suits them, and gaining new
customers more cost-effectively, what has the Web done for us? How
about opening up new markets?
The Monty Python rip-offs could go on all day, but the fact is
that the Web has not only changed the way we do business, but also
where.
Thinking back only a few years most small to medium UK
businesses couldn't have considered doing business, particularly
service-oriented business, with the other side of the world. The
costs and logistics involved were just too impractical to make it
worth considering.
By using the Internet, however, we don't have to be with our
customers to provide a good service, we don't even have to have
someone on the end of a phone line when they want to call. No good
doing it half-heartedly, as a poor site can do more harm than
good.Not communicating with customers in their language and along
their cultural guidelines can lead to patronising content that
results in distrust and dislike of your company.
For larger businesses there is always a headache involved with
being global, yet maintaining consistency in messages. If you've
got a large Web site and a wide catalogue of products, how do you
balance that with numerous presences all over the world each also
wanting their own Web site?
If you're not already a global business, be aware that times are
changing and it soon may not be just a case of tapping new markets,
but one of having to globalise to survive. As the term suggests,
globalisation isn't just a phenomenon affecting your own UK
backyard, but one that's happening worldwide. In a year or two it
may be your competitor in Taiwan that is taking away your faithful
local customers.
The potential markets are everywhere, wherever people use the
products or services you sell. The Web isn't a geographically
specific medium, but certain factors remain static, such as
language, culture and physical distribution.The Web offers no quick
fix to these problems, and they must be overcome traditionally.
Isn't the Web already global?
Surely my Web site can be accessed by anyone in the world, so I
already have a global business? Well, would you shop in Amazon if
it didn't have a UK presence and you had to pay more than the UK
list price after it had incurred import duty? Amazon needed a local
presence to target UK customers more effectively and aim its
messages towards their needs, values and aspirations, but it also
needed a physical outlet so that buyers didn't incur large delivery
charges and import duties. You also face the problem of linguistic
and cultural differences.Research from US-based research group
Forrester indicates that you are three times more likely to convert
a visitor to a customer if your site speaks their language. Having
to translate someone's Web site as you go means it requires a good
deal more effort than just reading it in your native language and
as constant barrages of statistics continue to show, Web customers
aren't prepared to work hard at online buying. Translation isn't
all you need to operate globally as every location and market is
different. People are different the world over and motivation to
purchase will differ even for the same profile of consumer in each
market. While localisation is a good way to reach customers on a
more personal level, it does leave you open to problems in the
consistency of messages and brand values. When issues develop very
quickly, smaller locally run sites can find themselves being behind
the corporate line, and for these reasons, an element of
centralisation and centrally-managed content and structure is vital
in a global Web business.
Short cuts and getting physical
We're all looking for short cuts or ways of reducing the cost of
reaching customers, and as always there are a lot of options out
there for companies that want to expand into new markets.
The main problem that e-commerce companies will face is getting
their products from base to customer. In this piece of logistic
activity, many factors are encountered, such as distribution costs,
import duties, value added taxes, customer service and so on. For
this reason, many companies enter into partnership with logistics
and distribution companies in order to reduce shipping costs to
customers and reduce congestion in main distribution outlets.
This also gives the company a small and cost effective base,
though when customer service issues arise, it's important to ensure
that call centre functions are also outsourced.
Globalising technically
The problem that most organisations face when localising content
in Asia are the double-byte characters which are necessary for
representing non-alphabet languages such as Japanese, Chinese or
Korean.
Whereas in English or French you are able to create an entire
character set in less than 256 characters (or one byte), some
languages do not fit into that pattern and cannot store the
necessary symbols in a single byte.The system used in these
languages is a double-byte encoding scheme that can store more than
65,000 pieces of information.
The main stumbling block with this is that most software isn't
designed to use this process and hence problems can arise.
Certain content management solutions exist to get round this and
other linguistic and localisation problems, for example software
from GlobalSight and Tridion can be used to create centralised
architectures for localised Web sites.These software packages
manage the content and delivery process to help facilitate a global
Web presence.
What makes a good global Web presence?
A good global Web presence will have many facets. It will
contain highly localised content. in the natural language of its
visitors and will communicate using messages that will appeal to
each local market's cultural identity.
It will have effective distribution, whether through partner
companies operating in the same sectors, or logistic partnerships
that create virtual presences in each local market. It is important
that each local market has a presence of some point to give each
customer a point of contact should the need arise. The presence
will offer content tailored to the needs of the visitors. Whether
this is through personalisation or less sophisticated means is open
to debate, as the value of generic personalised content is a matter
of contention among analysts.
Centralisation is a key theme in a successful global Web
presence and while localisation of content is essential, so is its
consistency with the central content. Centralisation can make it
easier to implement business decisions and can present significant
cost savings over a number of local sites, which can prove
difficult to manage from a corporate standpoint.
Case Study 1: Scania
A global truck manufacturer and, until recently, a sister
company of Saab, Scania is already a respected and well-known
global brand. But it found itself unable to meet or justify the
cost of multiple Web presences around the globe, each defining and
working with its own data infrastructure.
The company decided that it had to create a 'tool-kit' for its
local presences to be able to create their own sites, based on a
pre-defined framework of look and feel and specific
functionality.
This would give each regional operation the ability to create a
presence in their language with local content, while remaining
consistent to the core brand and not necessitating any large design
agency costs.
Annica Ahlberg, project leader for the Internet tool-kit at
Scania, explains: "We started this project as a simple way to
co-ordinate the Scania brand, but soon realised that this was a
good way to support the different markets with their own
identities. The structure is set out centrally, but content is
produced locally."
The company needed to make it easy for non-technical staff to
create and maintain the sites. Ahlberg continues: "We also wanted
to give [users] a usable interface to create and manage their own
content. "It was very important for us that this could be done
without technical experience so the infrastructure for the tool-kit
is placed on the central server in Sweden and the local editors
around the world are working with local content."
Scania has used content management software from Tridion called
Dialog Server to centralise structure and data, while also
providing a framework for local content to be created and managed
quickly and easily.
Case Study 2: XILINX
Xilinx is a developer of complete programmable logic solutions
such as advanced integrated circuits, software design tools and so
on. Xilinx decided to globalise its Web presence by moving from an
English-only corporate site to a series of multi-language
sites.
It cites "respect" of users as a key motivation for making this
change, with the Web strategy geared towards "communicating with
them (customers) in their native languages and building sites that
take into account the cultural differences of each region," says
David Stieg, the company's corporate communications director.
Xilinx decided to use a product from Idiom Software called
WorldServer, together with related consultancy services to assess
readiness for globalisation. The company started with a Japanese
language Web site and swiftly migrated to Idiom's WorldServer for
scalability and manageability reasons.
The company was keen to enable content collaboration and
maintenance among its staff, and globalisation manager Minko
Pettersen comments that: "WorldServer's work-flow capabilities
allow us to set and track the roles and responsibilities of our
translators and reviewers and establish and change the steps taken
through the translation process."
Case Study 2: Oracle
Oracle's case is less of a globalisation and more
centralisation. Since Larry Ellison's, president of Oracle, famous
speech challenging his company to cut $1bn from the bottom line,
Oracle has been centralising its regional offerings.
Its local operations needed to be highly integrated with the
central operation, which itself provides consistent messages that
can be tailored to each local marketplace.
The centralisation was very important for Oracle from a cost
perspective, but is also very important to its marketing
operations, as UK marketing manager for Oracle iPlatform, Carolyn
Patterson explains: "This centralisation means that we can now have
a central source of information that can be accessible to everyone
round the world with the same messages and the same knowledge base
on the direction of products."
The company was keen not to lose the personalisation it has
created within each of its local Web presences, however, and
Patterson feels that a Web site "needs personality. You need to be
able to offer a personal service and personal set of
information."
She adds that localisation is essential in reaching any
marketplace, and "linguistic and cultural differences must be
understood and embraced in order for any global presence to
succeed".
Oracle also points to decision-making advantages that come with
centralisation, "data can be captured and analysed centrally and as
a result you become much more agile as an organisation. You can
gather centrally and distribute locally more effectively, turning
data into knowledge.
This in turn can increase speed to market and facilitate much
faster business and marketing decisions."
Let someone else translate your site for you
An e-commerce portal that can translate documents via the Web
has been launched by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, the
speech and linguistic technology provider.
L&H iTranslator Online can provide machine translation of
documents of up to 5,210 words for rough quality translations for
no cost. If a more polished translation is required, it provides
fee-based access to L&H's network of human translation
services.
L&H iTranslator Online offers 29 different language pairs
for human translation and 16 different language pairs for machine
translation. The machine translation language pairs covered include
English to five languages and back (French, German, Italian,
Spanish and Portuguese) and cross-European languages including
French to German, German to Italian and others.
www.itranslator.com
Globalisation: The key factors
1. Localisation is essential. A market must be understood before
it is exploited - this means understanding the culture within the
market and the nuances of customers within that marketplace. Do not
attempt to imprint a corporate UK style as this will just turn
customers off.
2. Translation is essential. Forrester estimates that you have a
three-times better chance of converting a visitor to a customer if
you speak to them in their own language.
3. Centralisation makes the whole process much more
cost-effective. By locating data centrally or providing a framework
for local markets you can create a cost-effective global Web
presence.
4. Consistency in messaging is paramount. Content management is
crucial to attaining consistency across Web sites.
5. Delivering on promises, as with any transaction, is vital to
long-term success. This can be achieved through partner companies
that can help with order fulfilment or customer enquiries, but the
key is to make sure delivery is not too expensive, unpredictable or
time-consuming.
6. Make sure that you have representation in each market that
you operate within, even if it is outsourced. If you have a
customer in Australia that isn't happy, they may not want to wait
until UK office hours to complain.