Crownpeak Partners Discuss Translation & DX Challenges
By Gabriella Pirrone
May 28, 2019
Crownpeak, customer experience, CX, Digital Experience, Digital Quality Management, DQM, Lingotek, TH_NK, translation, WCM, Web Content Management
In conclusion to my time spent at the 2019 Crownpeak Empower UK event, please tune in below and watch the videos of my exclusive interviews with the following Crownpeak Partners as we discuss the ins and outs of translation innovations, digital experience trends, and challenges in the space.
Richard Roberts, Sales Director, GM at Lingotek
I had the chance to sit down with Richard Roberts of Lingotek, a cloud-based and SaaS solutions translation services provider that offers translation management software (TMS) and professional linguistic services for web content, software platforms, product documentation, and electronic documents. Richard began by providing a more in-depth look at the Lingotek and how their innovation allows for businesses to translate their content seamlessly.
“Lingotek is a US company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. They are one of the first companies to provide a SaaS-based TMS system, which means that we have workflows in the cloud that allow companies to translate content into multiple languages. We do that for some of the world’s biggest companies and some of the world’s most innovative companies. It allows us to take source text and then translate that into many, many languages, but, automatically then, push that back to those users to put either into their CMS systems or translate documents into their normal document banks that they have to support their customers. In some of the areas, it allows them to look at FAQ and knowledge bases and provide it back in every language that’s needed.”
Translation may seem like an easy task, but in reality, it can be quite daunting. You want to make sure that the accuracy and quality of your content are being maintained during this process. I asked Richard to discuss their relationship connection with Crownpeak and explain why translation is so important for customers?
“Let’s start with Crownpeak. Crownpeak, obviously, are a CMS provider. They have digital marketers working every day with their content that they want to get out to their customers. We provide a link into the Crownpeak system which allows that marketer to notify us what pieces of content they want to have translated. With the touch of a button, they push it out; it comes to us, we send it out to the relevant translation agency—could be ourselves at Lingotek—we translate that, we notify that marketer back that that’s been done. Once that’s been done, they can then preview that before they publish it. It could go out to somebody in Japan, they can preview to see what that’s going to look like on the Crownpeak system, they can make a few changes, send it back, and then that can be published.
At the same time, it retains that translation in the system. That means next time they go make that change; we can look at that, we can then apply that to the content that they send us, and only do the changes. So, it becomes a lot more effective—a lot quicker—and it meets this, ‘how quick can they get to market.’ It means that we don’t have to translate everything from the start, we can translate just things continuously—so they can change, we can publish, they can change, we can publish—and that meets the demands of the industry as it’s going forward.
It’s seamless, and a lot of companies don’t like translation. They gotta do it; it’s a natural thing to do. They’ve got to be a global organization; they need to have it in multiple languages. It’s something that they need to do, but it’s something that historically has been a really difficult task to do, and the main aim for us is to not have people touch that work. Is to do it frictionless, click a button, be notified, have a status report back, and then be able to publish that without really interfering with their day job because they’re as busy as they are.”
Lingotek can rebuild content right into any platform, product, or software which eliminates several steps that a usual translation process would take. Besides streamlining this process, I asked Richard, what are the key areas that Lingotek is focused on and what some of the innovations around translation are?
“The innovations are more, at the moment, about how do we automate those things? The big thing, at the moment, is can we connect into a number of systems that they’ve already purchased? A lot of these companies have got multiple systems—they might have Salesforce, they might have Oracle—and then they have lots of different applications. They really want to seamlessly bring things out, and translate them, and push them back. We’ve got a lot of developments in the connector side, so we can seamlessly connect in-and-out from the connector in that way. On the other side, we also interface with machine translation, so nowadays people might want to say ‘Well, I want that piece of content back very quickly. I want to put it back into my knowledge base’, so we can let them connect in and plug-and-play to any of the machine translation vendors that are available out there.’
There are areas that we’re pushing information to—like our little chatbots now—so if you want to push things back and forth through the chatbot, we can do those. And then we also provide a lot of analytics back to companies: ‘Where is that content? How well have you done that? Has it met the time scales? Has the budget been achieved?’ So again, it’s not really innovation, but it’s [that] people want to be made aware of what’s happening. Because there are so many digital owners now, we really have to have that so simple and easy for people to use. So, the innovation is to make it more consumer-based, so people can use it without really having to think, ‘What’s this system?’ They can stay in a system they’re familiar with, they can get a notification easily, and it just makes their day a lot easier. So, we’re innovating that way, and we’re innovating with speed, and we’re innovating with quality—they’re the key areas that we’re really focused on at the moment. And they don’t seem, sometimes, to be revolutionary, but they’re actually making that marketer’s day much easier so they can concentrate on what their customers need.”
Amanda Follit, Managing Director at TH_NK Live
Headquartered in Liverpool, Merseyside, TH_NK Live is a digital transformation agency helping businesses update their existing site or helping them to realize their digital ambitions. TH_NK Live works with clients such as LV= (Liverpool Victoria insurance company), Adecco, Shop Direct, Knight Frank, and ARUP. I asked Amanda to tell us a bit more about the company.
“TH_NK Live was formed to just work with clients on their live running platforms. We see a lot of clients trying to make the most out of their CMS and the tools that they have around their live platforms. What we do is help them through that process, so rather than thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got to throw away my platform and I’m going to start again’, what we do is make sure that they know how to run it properly—that they can use it to its best efforts, and to the best effect. That could be through some organizational change, and through some training through their teams—not just out-of-the-box training, but really understanding how to use things in the best way. And doing some audits—it could be that they have a web development agency who’s built something, and we can advise on how that can be updated or how they can work with their web development agency a bit better.”
My next question for Amanda is one I’m always excited to ask since I always receive a different response. I asked Amanda what some trends are that she sees in the digital experience market?
“What we’re seeing really, I would say, is [that] personalization is perhaps the number one area, and then moving into—it’s been a hot topic for a while, but people have really adopted it quite slowly in some areas—but the other area is moving into voice. Chatbots have boomed, for example. Now we’re moving into voice recognition and moving into what was termed as the Internet of Things, and how they interact in those ways. There’s been a massive journey, that people have come from the mobile-first approach in terms of experience, and seeing that right through, now, to voice. We will start seeing it moving to that, sort of, augmented reality space as well, at some point. As one of the speakers here said today, using those tools to actually augment their sales process and their customer experience process.”
Where there is digital experience, there are also challenges. I had Amanda touch on some of the common digital challenges that her clients are facing.
“When our clients are big global clients, who have distributed teams throughout the world, the biggest challenge that they face is consistency—as one of those issues—in terms of the brand consistency across the globe. ‘Look global and act local’ is really key for them, so that their local customers think that they are a local company and feel that they’re talking to them at that local level, but also, they’re a big global company. When they’ve got teams around the world—who they might not even know if there’s somebody new that has started, or they might not know if they’re trained and they’re working, very much, a small level—then at a global level, they find it hard to maintain the training and the support of those people to make sure they’re doing the right things. That’s how we use DQM [Crownpeak Digital Quality Management], for example, in a way where we’re using it as a subset of data to make sure that the teams are performing in the right way, in managing their websites, so that our clients don’t have to spend their money on A/B testing, all the time, and design, because it might not be that. It could be that person sitting in Poland is completely disengaged and needs some training—and we can detect that through some of the data that we use from DQM and other tools.”
Gabriella Pirrone
Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.