Globalizing the Customer Experience – with a Side of Generative AI

I recently had the pleasure of presenting CSA Research insights and data about global customer experience to Japanese enterprises in Tokyo. As with nearly every conversation we’ve had with companies over the last few months, generative AI was on everyone’s mind.?

First, the Customer Experience?

The challenge of expanding customer experience programs beyond Japan attracted Japanese executives and technologists to our seminar on business globalization in Tokyo, hosted by?mct Inc. Daishinsha Group,?CSA Research’s partner for global CX in Japan. Attending were decision-makers in customer-facing roles in marketing, sales, and CX design, along with their counterparts in business functions such as audit, human resources (HR), IT, R&D, and sustainability.?

Our?quantitative research?has long shown that both B2C and B2B customers and prospects have the best experience when a company localizes interactions to their language and expectations. That’s no surprise. However, the unfortunate reality is that many customer experience teams slack off once they start thinking beyond their HQ-country website. The CX developers typically implement two or three journey maps for sales or support in a few countries, but do so less diligently –?they leave gaping holes in the journey with no local content or localized functions.?

For example, our analysis of 255 branded sites in Japan determined that?on average serve up just 20% of the content?as the HQ-country site, typically for a very limited number of languages. That means Chinese or English speakers will encounter gaps in the experience at any one of the warning signs in the figure above, thus exiting their journey before making a purchase or getting the customer care they seek – and sales or customer satisfaction suffer. Speakers of languages that are less economically important must settle for content in another language – or they just leave without engaging at all.

The net result is that many Japanese brands trail companies in other developed economies in the amount of economic potential they realize from the global web. Anyone outside Japan targeting the country will have similar problems,?starting with but not ending with translating into Japanese.?

Global Customer Experience for Japanese Companies Looking Abroad

Our seminar addressed the ongoing challenge of business globalization from the perspective of customer experience and the global growth that localized CX can unlock. We laid out three major steps:

• Assess your CX maturity.?Review how well your company’s CX works in your home market. Benchmark your CX maturity – that is, the extent to which your company has mastered the staffing, process, and technological competencies to deliver a consistently good experience.?
• Invest in the base components.?This involves a top-to-bottom revision. Internationalize user interface and operational elements to support CX in the languages of your target international or domestic multilingual markets. Translate all the touchpoints for each customer journey. Adapt underlying processes and technology to local requirements and laws. Align all business functions that touch the experience.?
• Coordinate with other enterprise-wide initiatives.?CX involves many functions inside a company, from marketing to sales to engineering to support. Global CX takes that involvement a step further to globalize those functions – CSA Research developed the?Globalization Maturity Model?to help companies assess their competencies and performance in 21 categories across five areas: governance, strategy, process, organizational structure, and automation. It enables firms to measure, as well as accelerate, their progress in running the non-domestic parts of their business.

If they don’t successfully address these three areas, companies endanger predictable and profitable global growth in their CX efforts because they cannot serve local markets in a consistent, streamlined, cost-efficient, and sustainable manner.?

Questions from the Seminar Attendees

Our Tokyo seminar attendees had the same concerns about business globalization as decision-makers in companies around the world – “how do I justify the expense of localization? Show me the money!” I figure that I spend maybe one-half my client advisory time with buy-side companies discussing various bits of the business case for localization. That means drilling down into fundamentals such as ROI, level of investment, growth by sector, and competitive benchmarking. In the process we typically refer to our quantitative market research such as “Multilingual Digital Opportunities: 2022,” supplement that work with our?Global Revenue Forecaster??and?Global Customer Experience??tools exploring their business cases by target market, and then advise them to review individual reports about their particular practice areas.

Once we moved past those attendee concerns about the business case for globalization, attention shifted to an image of a tech stack on one of my slides labeled, “Business Systems and CRM Analytics powered by AI.” We were off to the races with questions about generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLM) from both the business and technical sides of the audience, including:

• Data security and privacy.?Attendees from both R&D and HR expressed immediate concerns about potential data leaks and exposure of personally identifiable information.?
• Readiness for Japan.?Given the likely relative sparseness of ChatGPT Japanese training data compared to heavily resourced English, attendees questioned the suitability of these all-in-one GenAI solutions to answer questions, summarize text, and translate text. How good will the Japanese output be??Among other reports, I referenced our research on GenAI-based MT, “Is Generative AI’s Translation Output Usable and for What?” and its focus on lesser-resourced languages as a guide to what they can expect in Japanese.

Enterprise decision-makers, planners, and their software suppliers, LSPs, and langtech vendors?have long needed to stay current on an array of current and evolving global content and technology issues. That requirement to be?au courant?now includes being?AI au courant?as well.?