How to deliver a consistent international customer experience

Delivering a consistent, coherent and rewarding customer experience is a priority for all brands, but it’s not an easy goal to achieve.

This is particularly true for businesses that operate across various channels in different geographical markets. An omnichannel, international approach can create exciting opportunities for growth and revenue generation, as long as you’re equipped with the right strategy and solutions to meet your audience’s expectations.

A strong understanding of what’s important to your customers, and how you can engage with them across different channels and platforms, will prove crucial to your success.

Customer experience challenges and pitfalls

One of the most significant customer experience trends modern businesses need to be aware of, particularly where cross-border commerce is concerned – is the ever-increasing complexity of the typical buyer journey.

Tech growth and advancement has opened up more channels than ever before to connect and build relationships with your audience. While this provides a lot of opportunity, it can also present certain risks.

If your efforts to communicate in different languages across various platforms result in an inconsistent brand message, you could lose credibility in the eyes of your customers. This can be particularly damaging if you’re a new entrant in a foreign market and you’re working to establish brand recognition and trust.

The customer experience will also suffer if people find it difficult to access the information they’re looking for or come across marketing content that isn’t relevant to them. The likely outcomes of these problems are higher bounce rates, fewer click-throughs and lead generation rates that fall short of your expectations.

Discussing some of the most common barriers to a positive cross-channel customer experience, Zach Marcov, (omnichannel delivery strategy manager at hardware and home goods retailer The Home Depot), highlighted the difficulty of refining your messaging to reflect the needs of specific audience segments.

“If you get it wrong and end up confusing them, they’ll find someone else that can be more clear in their offerings. If you inadvertently get them to choose an option that’s not best for them you could lose a customer for good,” Zach says.

Another important consideration is the growing interest in conversational customer service, a trend that was highlighted by speaker and bestselling author Adrian Swinscoe in Forbes. Adrian advises businesses to utilize software and tools that help them take a “more human approach” to customer experience.

Putting humanity and personalisation at the heart of your marketing and customer communications can generate various benefits for your business. But how do you achieve this when you’re communicating across different channels and regions?

New challenges require fresh solutions

Any business hoping to achieve international success should have a comprehensive set of brand guidelines that are reflected in all of your marketing, whatever language you’re using. The tone of voice used in your customer communications can give a strong account of what makes you unique and distinguishes you from the competition.

When you’re looking to connect with customers in international markets, it’s vital to focus not only on accurate translation of your marketing materials, but also on effective localisation. This helps to ensure that every piece of content you create is tailored to be relevant and impactful for specific audiences, without losing your core tone of voice and brand identity.

If you need to identify issues that are limiting your attempts to engage customers across channels and markets, a comprehensive audit of your marketing strategy could be beneficial. Based on your findings, you can start to devise a structured programme of changes and solutions that will help you deliver a more coherent and compelling customer experience.

A/B testing is one useful tactic that will help you work out what linguistic styles and terminology lead to the best results with certain audience segments. As Locaria CEO Hannes Ben pointed out in a recent blog post, this process provides the data required for marketing teams to make informed decisions about what content types perform better.

Technology is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal when you want to deliver a consistent and compelling customer experience. Identifying the right tech solutions for you and applying them in the most effective way will help to point you in the right direction to achieve long-term success.

One way that we at Locaria help our clients to tackle the problem of fragmented marketing workflows and customer journeys in cross-border commerce is with Locate. This centralised, cloud-based content delivery platform helps our clients drive improvements in efficiency and increase control over key processes, which is essential if you want to achieve a consistent brand tone of voice.

To discuss how Locate could help you deliver a stronger international customer experience across all channels, get in touch.

Synopsis by Nicola Pegoraro