The Customer Experience: Going Global While Keeping it Local
As businesses expand across the world, they often struggle to connect with customers in other countries. Language barriers and different cultural beliefs make this connection even harder. Keep reading to discover how your company can bridge this gap and establish a more familiar local relationship with customers from across the globe.
Customer Decision Journey
This whole idea started with McKinsey & Company eight years ago as they tried to explain the exact moments in which customers would be influenced to make purchase decisions.
This new term was developed because customers are no longer bound by the traditional three step process of decision making. The old phases were as follows: awareness, engagement, and final transaction. Today this process includes more actions such as research, influence, and post-purchase reactions.
Making a Connection
As we discuss influence as a new factor in the customer decision journey, we must understand what those influences are. Family, friends, advertisers, spokespersons, even the reviews of total strangers are all important influences.
Each of these individually impacts the consumer’s perception of a brand at any point in the customer decision journey. Every business wants to ensure that potential customers are able to establish a real relationship with your brand, because this is what creates truly loyal customers.
Global Customer Loyalty
So how exactly do you create this profound connection? There is no perfect formula, but here are a few ways to get started.
- Be Efficient
Try to keep things uniform and systematic across all countries. Develop a model of operation that is simple enough to be carried out in all locations. This will keep all employees on the same page regarding what the company’s goals are and how leaders of each division should strategically solve major issues.
- Be Relevant
Due to the many different languages and cultures that are intertwined in a global operation, there has to be room for customization. You want to keep initiatives as close as possible in all countries, but do not forget to tailor the experience in order to make it relevant to the customer.
This tactic will also help to improve the overall performance of your advertisements since the primary objective of all major ad platforms is to deliver relevant results to the user.
Go beyond standard translations to include content that the user can actually identify with. Storytelling is an incredibly powerful in method across all languages, but they cannot be told the exact same way. So much of their intended context would be lost in basic translation.
- Be Human
Utilize technology as much as you can to improve systems and the knowledge within the business. However, as it was mentioned above, the customer needs to really connect with the brand. This connection is made much easier with human interactions and engagements.
Artificial Intelligence software is rapidly improving this capability. Machines could soon overtake this aspect, but for now it is best to facilitate the need for human insight with actual humans.
