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October 2, 2020Language is the most basic form of personalisation and it plays a huge role in a customer’s experience – Interview with Allison McDougall of Amplexor
Today’s interview is with Allison McDougall who is the SVP of Global Revenue at Amplexor, a leading digital solution provider offering global compliance, digital experience and content solutions. Allison joins me today to talk about language, culture and what it takes to deliver a great customer experience when operating across borders or across multiple languages and cultures.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Our leadership impact is really about how we show up and who we are – Interview with Anese Cavanaugh – and is number 360 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pegasystems for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.
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Here’s the highlights of my chat with Allison:
- The pandemic has produced some interesting new trends. Did you know that there are now 132 million Google results now for ‘loungewear’.
- The pandemic has forced brands to really accelerate their digital transformation.
- The three big changes and lessons that have stood out from Allison’s perspective:
- 1. Agility, both personal agility and collective agility is becoming increasingly important. That means being open to learn and to learn new things.
- 2. There has been a huge push towards being sensitive to the perspectives of others.
- 3. Stay true to your values, understand and identify what your values are. Stay true to them and embrace the future.
- Personal agility means being comfortable with the uncomfortable.
- It’s important to remember that only approximately 20% of the people on the Internet have English as their native language.
- Analysts estimate that it takes 19 languages to reach 80% of the world population.
- So, translating your assets is certainly a good first step when it comes to delivering across borders.
- Translation demonstrates that you care about that specific population or market.
- But, understanding the local culture, it’s nuances and adapting your content or product to them is critical.
- Have you noticed the chat function that most ecommerce sites have these days…..The really savvy ones, the ones that are truly dedicated to the global marketplace, actually have a multi lingual, simultaneous chat function enabled.
- Does a globally designed experience always work a local level? The answer lies in knowing the customer and how and where they search for your products or solutions including the search engines they use.
- Did you know that there are several countries who rely on search engines other than Google? Are users typing on a keyboard or using voice search? How does research and evaluation differ from the actual purchase process from one market to another? Does the audience research products on their mobile device and then go to their desktop to make the actual purchase?
- Language is the most basic form of personalisation and it plays a huge role in a customer’s experience.
- Many companies think that translation is a simple conversion process but there are often 10 or 15 ways, methodologies if you will, to convert one language to another.
- But, it goes beyond the words that we use. It goes on and includes things like color choice. Different colours have very strong meanings and strong connotations, depending upon the culture. It’s the same with graphics and image choices.
- To get it right you have to be sensitive about the entire experience.
- Going forward, we need to be open to learning from one another, from our failures and to let go of what may have worked in the past.
- You know people talk about customer experience and people talk about employee experience and the conversation is quite dis-aggregated. We need to start thinking about and having a more holistic conversation about experience.
- Allison’s best advice: Know thy customer. To do that we need to go beyond the data. We need to spend (more) time with our customers.
- If leaders want to be able to do that, they have to consider doing some fairly radical things. A couple of suggestions: One, redeploy their personal assistant to another part of the business so that they can take control of their time again and, two, arbitrarily cancel, at least, 20% of the meetings that they’re going to be in every week so they can free up time to do this sort of work.
- The Internet has proven that languages are not going away and that actually more and more languages are coming to light and many of the old languages are successfully being preserved.
- We’re also seeing different languages emerge across generations. Allison has observed this in the US where Gen Z’ers will speak a different language amongst themselves and then will formalize it with Gen Xers or with the older generations.
- Allison’s Punk CX word: memorable.
- Allison’s Punk CX brand: Chipotle Mexican Grill.
About Allison
Allison McDougall is the SVP of Global Revenue at Amplexor, a Top 10 language services partner based in Luxembourg working with the world’s leading brands on digital content strategies and execution.
In her role, she is responsible for a team of 20 individual contributors and 1st line managers; Sales P&L; and value chain expansion beyond traditional localization solutions. Amplexor’s solutions include technology and services to address the entire content lifecycle and position Content as a competitive “edge”.
Allison thrives at the intersection of global business + digital marketing + language and over the course of her career, she has partnered with several global brands to re-imagine how they engage with customers through Content.
Allison is also an active Connector, and maintains strong affiliations with U. of Illinois, Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and Women in Localization, where she has served on the Board for 9 years.
Find out more about Amplexor at amplexor.com, say Hi to them on Twitter and Instagram @amplexor and @amplexor.official respectively and do connect with Allison on LinkedIn here.