In 2018, a leading explosives provider to the mining and construction industries determined it should localize its unique portal website if it wanted to provide customers with important data that could increase productivity and reduce costs.
The company, which serves markets in nearly every continent, operates a customer portal with powerful capabilities. The site enables customers to input geological information about their worksites, simulate explosion blasts with software, and study the projected outcomes. This provides valuable insights that can optimize the design of an on-site explosives charge, which can streamline worksite processes and eliminate costs.
But the company provided this engaging and helpful solution in English only. This greatly limited the global salability of the portal and its services.
If the company wanted to grow—and fully embrace its commitment to providing world-class services around the world—it would need to translate its customer portal.
The Challenge
The lack of localized content extended beyond the company’s unique portal, however. Only a small collection of traditional offline documents had been translated for non-English speakers. The rest of those documents were available exclusively in English.
The business initially considered localizing the portal and offline content using in-house resources, but its lean team didn’t have the time, budget or expertise to tackle the product quickly or affordably.
More significantly, the customer portal—which was built with several complex frameworks and presented dynamic, personalized results from numerous databases—would have been practically impossible to localize. Nearly every translation vendor the company interviewed couldn’t handle the technical complexity, either.
And there was a greater problem: Even if the company could translate this complicated content, it didn’t have the resources to localize and operate these experiences on an ongoing basis.
The Impact
The lack of a fully localized user experience was stunting the company’s ability to properly serve international customers and increase revenue.