6 Tips for Scaling Support Content Globally

One of the most uncomfortable moments in a breakout session any time I attend a U.S. content-focused conference is when some brave soul asks the question, "So how do you scale this outside the U.S.?"

The answer is very often, "We don't."

But when it comes to support content in particular, your localized help center is very often one of the lowest cost options for entering a new/emerging market with your product or service. And if done well, it can be extremely effective for establishing your brand, understanding your users, and creating a great self-service support foundation.

This blog post assumes you'll be using third-party translation vendors, as most larger companies do. I'll be writing a follow-up post about how to determine if this is the right path for your company and content.

 

1. Leverage local teams.

Marketing teams are often the first boots on the ground—they're there to drum up excitement, build relationships with customers, and learn what will work in this specific locale. That makes them a phenomenal resource for figuring out what your self-service customers will need first.

Connect with those teams early to set yourself up for translation success:

  • Ask for a review of your localized voice and tone guide as well as your translated glossary of terms. These are the kinds of resources your translation vendors will use when they start working with your content.
  • Request a review of translated content. Using a structured rubric is key here—you'll want to ask about distinct areas like grammar/punctuation, product accuracy, localized brand voice and tone, and terminology. You might have a translator nailing it with voice and tone but being inconsistent with terminology—you want to make sure to get structured feedback to correct the specific shortfalls.
  • Find out what content local customers need most. Your customers outside the U.S. are likely to have many of the same support needs as your domestic customers, especially in sister markets like Canada. But there will also be features that are uniquely important (or don't apply at all) that deserve special attention—think anything related to payments, taxes, and privacy to start with. Your local teams can give you more insight on specific functionality their markets want so you can focus on that support content first.

 

2. Copy and paste common phrases.

Consistency is key when it comes to keeping translations high-quality, low-cost, and with quick turnaround.

On top of that, having a glossary of frequently used instructional phrases makes creating new source content easier internally because you won't have to recreate the wheel each time you write an article. (Check out TextExpander to create a shared database of phases you can call into content with keyboard shortcuts.)

For example, on the Eventbrite help center, this is one of our most commonly used first steps:

After logging in and creating an event, click or tap on your event from the Manage Events page, then select "Manage."

Prior to standardizing how we wrote this instruction, there were lots of variations of it, like:

Click on your event on the manage page.

Go to your event in the manage tab. 

Click Manage Events and find your event.

All of these phrases convey the same intent, but do so in completely different ways. If we used all four phrases across four different articles, we'd pay for each string's translation and end up with four distinct ways of saying the very same thing.

Keep it simple: spend time figuring out the best possible phrase, then stick with it.

Consistency pays off for customers beyond just localization—when you're creating support content, patterns help your users skip the irrelevant steps more confidently and focus on just what they need. Your goal isn't to have them read each precious word you've written—it's getting them their answer quickly and painlessly.

 

3. Borrow from similar languages.

Not all English languages are created equal—but the content might be 98% equal, and it's hard to justify keeping up half a dozen different versions of English help centers for the difference in "flavor" versus "flavour." The same issue comes up for any country that colonized around the world—European Spanish and Central/South America, European Portuguese and Brasil, etc.

Rather than giving yourself a content maintenance nightmare, use some simple find-and-replace logic. How you implement this will depend on what content management system you're using (and how much control you have over it), but essentially these are the steps:

  1. Determine your master language. For English, ours was U.S. English. Since Eventbrite has offices in Argentina, we're also using Argentinian Spanish as the master Spanish.
    • Canadian French is an exception to this practice—it's significantly different from European French, so we treat it as its own locale.
  2. Set up your other countries' help centers to pull the master language unless something has been published for that locale. For example:
    • The article "How much does it cost for organizers to use Eventbrite?" has a version published in U.S. English and U.K. English. That's because the detailed answer to this question varies a lot between the two locales (our fees are different and currency varies as well).
    • The article "How to set up discount codes" has a version published in U.S. English. The feature works the same everywhere, so the U.K. help center simply pulls the U.S. article since we didn't create a unique version for the U.K.
  3. Important! Build out exceptions to the rules and do so mindfully. This allows the source content to appear localized by top-level domain (TLD) without all the extra work of creating individual articles. For example:
    • Set up your find-and-replace logic to find words like "organizer" and change it to "organiser" for the U.K. locale. 
    • Be careful with words like "cheque"—as a noun, the find-and-replace logic works fine for the U.K. locale. But as a verb, you don't want users to see "cheque your inbox."

 

4. Use segmentation in Google Analytics.

If you're working on content in a locale you already serve, the segmentation feature in Google Analytics is your friend (you do have Google Analytics installed, right? If not, go do that immediately—more on why that's super duper important at the end of this article).

Google Analytics is like an angel sent from prioritization-based-on-data heaven. You'll quickly be able to understand how much of your user base is domestic and how much isn't—and proportion your resources accordingly:

All you need to do to generate this report is pick a timeframe and go to Behavior>Site Content>All Pages. Then add a segment (detailed instructions here, straight from the fine folks at Google's support team). That's it: you'll see countries compared against one another to understand relative priority (more on that below).

Important Note: These segments are based on where a user is located when they access your content—not which TLD or language they chose to access. We definitely see users in Germany access English help center articles. But in general, this is great directional data.

Bonus: This report is especially nice to run when a language spans multiple countries. For example, when we want to understand German language content needs, we pull in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Belgium.

 

5. Give your global users a feedback channel.

I've written about the importance of collecting article feedback before, and the same principles apply across a multi-language system. Since your non-U.S. audiences are likely to be smaller (for U.S.-based companies), paying attention to what's getting the most user feedback is especially important.

You can use Google Translate to get a rough idea of any article feedback provided in languages you don't speak (for example, maybe a customer is just reporting that an image or link is broken—you can probably fix this without speaking a word of Dutch).

I'd also strongly suggest using a "request this translation" feature if you aren't translating 100% of your English source content. You can allow users to access the URL for their TLD with a message letting them know you're providing the English content because their requested locale isn't available—but they can ask for the translation.

At Eventbrite, this is a simple email request system—an email template clarifying the content title and requested language is sent to an alias for our content team to handle. Receiving messages like this helps us understand what content is in demand in a particular locale. 

Since we translate most content, we don't get these emails too often and therefore we haven't built out a more robust request system—but if you want to take a conservative approach on what you'll translate, a system like this can really help you know what to focus on.

 

6. Prioritize what gets worked on.

If you care about customer experience outside your primary U.S. market (and I'm assuming you do since you're reading this), one of the hard truths to swallow is that your secondary markets simply won't get the same amount of resourcing as your primary market.

The ideal might be to get these locales to "U.S. quality," but if the market represents 2% of your help center user base, it's hard to justify spending the same amount of time or money on that content.

All of these tips are meant to help you stretch your resources further for your customers around the world—but at the end of the day, the best way to make sure you're doing the best possible job is to make sure you have a solid way of prioritizing what gets attention. At Eventbrite, we consider:

  • Issue sensitivity. Any content that covers topics like money or legal issues floats to the top of our hit list. You do not want to mess that up.
  • Pageviews. We look at global performance of our articles to determine the top articles our customers need. At one point I looked at the top articles across all of our locales and there was so much overlap in what trended as important that just 20 total articles covered every country's top 5 articles.
  • Customer feedback. If you're getting a lot of article votes and/or feedback, bump that content higher on your priority list.
  • Content age. The older an article gets, the more likely it's in need of an update. You'll have to judge "how old is too old" based on how much your product or service has changed.

Prioritization is even more important if you're thinking about localizing screenshots, which can be a massive amount of work if you don't have an automated system for it. One way my team mitigates this is by ensuring that our screenshots are always as focused as possible—we don't show the entire user interface if we're only referring to a third of what's on that page. We show enough context to be clear while restricting what's shown as much as possible since the product changes constantly. And we reuse screenshots as much as instructional phrases to ensure upkeep is manageable across the board.

 

Localization is a balancing game, and the most important thing is having an equally strong sense of global customer experience standards combined with a strong sense of what's logistically viable. Without the former, your customers end up feeling deliberately second-rate and without the latter, you'll never stop throwing money at a problem. Fight for both and you can win the world over.

 

Why I Left Journalism and Never Looked Back (Mostly)

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me about my transition from journalism to copywriting and content strategy, and whether she should consider a similar move. At the time, I simply told her to go for it, but such a significant shift probably warrants a bit more explanation.

I graduated with, among other things, a B.A. in English—something no one thought to tell me typically leads to either graduate school or teaching, neither of which I felt strongly about (both of which I considered). Fortunately, I'd worked for the university newspaper since arriving on campus and my experience in that tiny newsroom gave me sufficient résumé fodder to get paid slightly more in a slightly larger newsroom in almost-middle-of-nowhere Texas.

I lasted longer than most—about a year and a half—before I realized I needed a change. Here's why the transition made sense for me:

  1. I realized I hated forcing people to talk to me (and then questioning whether to trust their word). I worked the hard news beat, often covering crime and politics, and that meant people didn't always want to talk to me. On more than one occasion, people charged with crimes came into the office looking for me, and only now are the mugshots not the first image to come up when you Google image search my name.
    Moving into copywriting and content strategy for a digital agency meant working with people who were actually paying to talk to me and were passionate and excited about what we could create together. I was able to keep my reporter's curiosity in getting to know their business while helping them translate that into the most authentic voice for their online presence
  2. I decided I wanted to focus on quality more than quantity. When you work in a small newsroom, you eventually wear every hat: on-scene reporting, writing, copyediting, proofing, photography, layout. And while that does keep things interesting, it didn't take long for me to feel like there was more focus on getting a paper out every day on as few resources as possible as opposed to taking the time to create really quality work less often (the result of a die-hard daily).
    Copywriting appealed to me because it gave me the chance to think about a single headline for a few days or explore the proper tone for a site over a week or two. I wanted depth in my craft, and I still got the breadth I loved  by working with clients in many different industries.
  3. I fell in love with architecting information online.It started with hyperlinking to previously written stories when I posted the oft-maligned web edition of our paper (the stories I could tell you about our commenters...). When I realized the potential for connecting  just the right information at the  just right moment, I recognized the power of digital content.
    I adore the printed word and I'll be the first to defend journalism as an important craft in today's world regardless of medium, but I wanted to dig deeper into how people experience stories and information they're interested in online, and content strategy lets me do that every day.

I'm privileged to love the work I do and to feel really at home with my chosen career. While it's not right for everyone, it's absolutely where I want to be. It's a relatively young field (let's just say this job didn't exist in any recognizable format when I was doing career research back in middle school), and it's still defining itself.

But that's just one more thing I love—there's a chance to do something really special in a field so new. I hope more smart, capable, information-loving people join us, and I know journalism is one of the places we'll find those next content strategists.

Swing Both Ways: Why Print Bibliophiles Should Stop Hating On E-books

My Spanish barista friends must have thought I was mad when shortly after sitting down to an afternoon Earl Grey, I frantically asked in broken Spanish if they could watch my heavy bag while I ran back to the metro station for Gertrude Stein. I was taking "American Writers in Paris" while studying English literature in Madrid (yeah, process that for a moment), and I'd been reading a copy of "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" I stole from a library in Texas. I'd left it on the subway and panicked when I realized this.

Fortunately, the woman at the ticket counter understood my description of a small red book and produced it with a smile that said "you might be crazy, please leave now."

Today, this little hardback sits on my shelf, and every time I look at it, I remember this experience and smile. No other book has the same backstory. Had I been carrying an e-reader, I probably wouldn't have gotten it back and I wouldn't attach this memory to any particular text.

 

Embracing the Dark Side

Cut to last fall, when I purchased my first e-reader. It was a momentous occasion. Just a mere three years ago, I was fiercely devoted to print (hell, I worked at a newspaper). And to this day, when I walk into a good bookstore, I find myself needing to pee from excitement. But I've grown to love this digital format... and grown annoyed with the idea that I'm cheating on my other books.

The notion that e-books are inferior to "real" books is a misconstrued debate, and the fighting has to stop. It's about as productive as arguing over whether listening to an audio book "counts" as reading a book. Seriously? The "real thing" when it comes to storytelling goes further back than Gutenberg's press—all the way to oral storytelling traditions. So maybe audiobooks are really more authentic choices.

Stories are an experience. The format of that experience is not what makes the content worth engaging.

 

Why E-books Are My Friends

I chose my first e-books deliberately; I read Content Strategy for Mobile by Karen McGrane. It seemed like the most appropriate thing to try. Here's why I ended up loving the e-book experience more than I ever anticipated:

  • Feedback. When I downloaded my first e-books, I also started using ReadMill. It is an almost surreal experience to be able to tweet comments on specific selections not only to my friends but to the actual author as well. She may not reply back, but I can give immediate feedback on how I'm receiving her work (although I've engaged in conversations with two authors via Twitter so far).
  • Community. As much as I love book clubs (and don't intend to give them up), it's also fantastic to immediately see how people I will never meet IRL respond to something I've reacted to. My thoughts can be immediately influenced by others if I choose and thus have the chance to mature faster. I hope to see more web content structured this way in the future. In fact, I'd argue that reader feedback methods on most blog is disappointingly behind the curve (but that's another blog post).
  • Portability. I still have many of my college textbooks that I can't bring myself to discard whenever moving time rolls around. It's both a matter of financial and intellectual investment. I may never sit down to re-read the whole of Plato's work or my massive collection of women's poetry—but I do return to sections of these texts now and then, and my notes remind me of where my mind was years ago. I don't want to discard these experiences—which is where e-books come in as a joy for those who feel connected to our texts and prefer living as lightweight as possible. (Interestingly enough, there's also an argument that just the opposite fuels e-book popularity—that e-books are the new mass market paperback.)
  • Accessibility. Despite the abundance of trolling and otherwise disappointing human behavior, the potential this medium holds is mind blowing. As a civilization, it's startling how quickly we've moved from the preciousness of printed materials to an information free-for-all. What this means for education in places with limited opportunities is even more inspiring to me.

 

Stop Quibbling, Start Imagining

The long of the short of this bookish debate is that e-books can do things and have advantages that printed books cannot and do not. But the reverse is true as well.

Each format has its place, and I want to see what each can accomplish that the other cannot. For example, if you're going to spend the money to print something, make it different than what could be conveyed in a digital format.

I'm currently reading Kern and Burn: Conversations With Design Entrepreneurs, which has been bound in a lovely soft-touch coating that actually makes me pick up the book more often. That, my friends, is the power of print—and it's not being exercised often enough.

 

Swing Both Ways. Seriously.

But here's the real secret: you don't have to choose one or the other. You can love both (and most people are not exclusive with their book choices).

I have by no stretch of the imagination abandoned print (more than a dozen boxes of books my Dad has moved more than once is a testament to that). I stand in old bookstores and just breathe in the stories (ones printed on pages and ones left there by their former owners)—but I also spend my day writing content for the web. I have 6 pen pals I handwrite letters to every month—but I send email every hour.

Print and digital content are not at war. They are allies in the greater battle against ignorance.