Outbound
Localization
Benefits
It’s a well-known fact that as far as your products and services are concerned, becoming a global enterprise entails much more than just translating them into the local language. In today’s global marketplace, your products and services must reflect the needs of the local market in terms of culture, language and business requirements.
Description
Localization is the process of creating a product or service that appears to have been produced in the target country. It will have the same look and feel (or, in this case, “sound and feel”) as if it had been developed locally. With a custom speech or DTMF IVR application, we help you create a system where your callers are engaged in a conversation with an IVR that:
- Relates to your callers
- Speaks to them in their own dialect
- Uses familiar terminology and concepts
- Presents a pleasant and natural experience
Whether you’re localizing an existing IVR, or creating a new one from the ground up, our team of User Interface Designers and native language linguists work with you throughout the design, development, and testing processes to create a localized IVR. This helps ensure that your company’s brand is projected in a way that callers expect from your company, and it shows that you’re speaking to them in their language.
The PTP Localization service offering is conducted in five phases: Kickoff and Research, Custom Persona Creation, Voice Talent Selection, Application Design and Testing.
What this Means to Your Customers
Localization will help you support your customers in different countries with an IVR telephone experience that shows that you know your callers and care about their issues. A localized IVR does the following:
- Shows that you understand your callers and their expectations of your company
- Demonstrates that you are addressing their needs
- Allows you to project your brand to a local market
Localization is closely tied with the concept of an IVR application persona, which may be thought of as the “personality” of your IVR system. The persona represents the embodiment of the IVR application’s human-like characteristics, and is comprised of a number of factors, including:
- Voice Talent – A professional voiceover actor who is a native speaker of the target language, speaking in a way that is tailored to the needs and expectations of your callers; this includes gender of the voiceover actor, tonal qualities, pace, etc.
- Coaching – Pace, intonation, emotion (where appropriate, e.g., helpful, apologetic, serious, etc.)
- Audio Quality – Professional voice talent recorded in a professional setting
- Style – word choice and grammar of the prompting
To determine what persona is right for your application, we’ll examine your business needs, the needs of your end users, and how you want to project your brand.
Kickoff and Research Phase
We’ll work with your local business and marketing teams, leveraging your knowledge of your callers in the target country, along with our User Interface Design and linguistic expertise, to determine:
- Who are your callers?
- Why are they calling?
- Are we localizing an existing IVR, or building one from the ground up?
- If we’re localizing an existing one, how are the needs of the target population different from those of the existing caller base?
- How do they reach your company today?
- What marketing outreach has been done to the target population? How can this be leveraged in the IVR? (For example, have users been trained to use your marketing terms or industry jargon?)
Custom Persona Creation
We deliver a document to you containing the description of your persona as it has been designed, to embody your brand while still presenting a “voice” to your callers that they trust and enjoy speaking with. This will be based on the following:
- The needs of your customers in the target country
- Your business needs, globally and locally
- How you market your brand both in the target country and globally
To bring to life the persona we’ve designed, we’ll audition a number of professional voiceover actors who are native speakers of the language and dialect spoken by the target caller population. Usually this means selecting someone who speaks the “broadcast news” version of the language. It’s also desirable at this point to conduct a local Online Focus Group, where participants from the target population who match the demographic characteristics of your expected caller base, will provide their feedback in an online survey regarding what they expect from your persona. They then listen to the audition files and respond with their impressions of the voices.
Based on this feedback, and working with our User Interface design team and native language linguists, you’ll select the voice talent who best embodies your persona. See our Persona Development service offering for more details.
Application Design
We’ll design a call flow and User Interface Document that reflects your business needs and those of your users in the target culture.
If we’re translating an existing IVR application, we’ll review the call flow at the same time, looking out for potential cultural “gotchas” and making any structural modifications that may be necessary.
At every step in the process, our VUI experts and native language consultants review the syntax, word choice and level of formality, keeping in mind any subtle cultural nuances that may arise. Much more than just a translation, we want to make sure that the language used is not just the correct way to say something, but the way that “feels right” to the local population. And we work with your stakeholders through our iterative design process, to ensure we’re designing an application that meets your business needs, your marketing needs, and the needs of your target caller base.
We’ll record the deployment prompts in a professional setting, with our native linguists and user interface designers providing coaching and direction to the voice talent, to ensure that every phrase spoken in the application sounds natural to the native speaker.
Testing
Usability Testing and Tuning, which are part of our standard User Interface Design service, are used to test the application’s persona. These activities provide another chance to modify the persona, change wording, and re-recording with different coaching. By monitoring callers and their reactions to the system, we can continue to maintain and update the system in line with caller needs and the application's persona.
Expertise
PTP takes a pragmatic approach to User Interface Design, using your key business objectives as the drivers in our proven design methodology. Our team of user interface designers and project managers consistently exceed expectations by increasing customer satisfaction and automation rates, while also extending the organization’s brand to the IVR.