A Localization Strategic Metric to measure the impact of Globalization activities.

A couple of weeks ago, I published a post on LinkedIn that generated many visits. It was a result of sharing a study I read in the Science Daily about Emotional reviews vs. five-star ratings. And this week, I decided to delve deeper into this topic since "emotions" significantly impact customer experience, which often goes unnoticed. 

Reflecting on how a Localization team contributes to enhancing the customer experience of a product is one of the most potent metrics we can use to measure the business value of a Globalization professional

For years in the mobile application space, 5 stars were the holy grail that every Publisher was looking for.

5 stars were the difference between succeeding with your app and reaching stardom and the top positions in the App Stores or going totally unnoticed as the number of apps available in the mobile stores is overwhelming. 

This study highlights that the University of Massachusetts Boston was able to predict the success of movies, commercials, books, and restaurants by relying on the "emotionality" of reviews instead of the star rating.

And when I read this article, I had an aha-moment. I have always thought that in the G-localization industry, we don't take full advantage of the Sentiment Analysis feedback. 

In the following paragraphs, I want to go deeper into this feedback and turn it into a fundamental metric to include in conversations with the Senior Leadership team as part of Strategic KPIs.

Let's start at the beginning, what’s sentiment analysis?

“Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing technique used to determine whether data is positive, negative, or neutral.”

Having seen the definition, the next question to address is how a Localization team can benefit from Sentimental Analysis feedback to create a truly strategic metric?

From my perspective, the localization industry has become obsessed with the ROI metric as the most important metric to determine the value of the work that localization professionals do.

But I have never been a big fan of Localization ROI because, as I see it, Localization is not a process with a clearly defined and directly measurable impact. Furthermore, there is no single metric that helps link localization activities to revenue. However, the Sentiment Analysis metric can better understand the business impact of localization tasks.

In sales or marketing, it is clear how we can calculate ROI.

You invest x USD and get x+y USD. The "y" can be converted into the ROI of the activity. But in Localization, that equation doesn't work like that.

Just because we localize a product, say in German, does not mean that all the profit made in Germany is attributable to the localized product. 

Localizing a product does not mean growing automatically if that's the only activity done to go global. 

Localizing a product greatly indeed increases growth potential, but Localization alone is not enough. We need the rest of a company's operations to take advantage of this increased reach.

Localization is, therefore, an essential element combined with Product, Marketing, Development, UX Design, Audio, and other activities. Localizing a product on its own does not do much, but without Localization is impossible to grow anywhere near as much 

That's why ROI KPIs don't seem to be the right metric for a Localization team, but Sentiment Analysis KPIs seem to me to be an excellent metric to track.

Since customers express their thoughts and feelings more openly than ever before, sentiment analysis becomes an essential method to monitor and understand that sentiment. 

How to analyze Sentiment Feedback from a localization perspective

We can perform a sentiment analysis manually if we have a small dataset, but it is time-consuming. So a better idea is to set up a system to get automated feedback.

1.- Monitoring forums, social media, and users feedback

An excellent place to get sentiment feedback is in the official forums of your products or fan boards. We can even monitor what people post about our company/products by using third-party sites and apps.

Ideas about how to monitor Sentiment Feedback

Google Alerts is easy to set up, and it'll help us to monitor whatever we want to monitor.

We can go even deeper with tools such as Yext, where we can manage, measure, and improve our reputation by tracking customer reviews.

Putting in these systems filters to get alerts when there is a reference to "language" will help us get end-user feedback. 

 Microsoft is known as one of the companies that makes the most effort to have sentiment analysis feedback as one of its keys metrics

Source: Displayr 

Sentiment analysis feedback to be well done needs to be captured over a vast period and create a histogram view so we can analyze the trends over time

 2.- Short in-app surveys

Another good idea to get customer experience = sentiment feedback is with surveys.

Just a few relevant questions to ask for feedback for your users is a great way to get direct input to link to customer experience.

From a Localization perspective, we can even ask directly to our users what we want to know.

Customers are constantly thinking of ways our products can work better for them. If we ask them, they tend to respond.

The key to this approach is to create a concise survey because our users are in the app for a particular purpose (which is not to answer a survey); therefore, it is not a great idea to throw a long survey.

Three questions I believe is the max we should include there to avoid survey fatigue

 If you are not familiar with how to create an in-app survey, Intercom.io is a good tool to start with

In summary…

 Users don't look at the product and say, "Wow! This translation is awesome."

They probably don't even care about the translation, which is actually a good thing as it means that the translation effort is unnoticed. Localization works as an enabler, and if the language quality is good, we are enabling the use of the app. Still, if the translation doesn't make sense, then the language becomes an obstacle to delivering a good customer experience if it's confusing or unnatural. And Customers will mention this on Social Media. 

Users see the product as a whole, and they don't distinguish between QA efforts, marketing efforts, coding efforts, or localization efforts. Therefore we need to find a way to isolate the language contribution to the customer experience. Sentiment Feedback shows us how to find a way as localization professionals to quantify customer experience with methods such as sentiment analysis or in-app surveys.

Then we can convert this into Sentiment Analysis feedback that we can share with the Senior Leadership team as part of the Company Strategic KPIs.

What other strategies do you think can be used to obtain customer experience metrics that we can somehow link to language?

Have a fabulous week!

@yolocalizo