Language operations is a term you’ll be hearing a lot more often, and it’s going to be as crucial to your business as DevOps, RevOps or MarketingOps are today.
In 2020 alone, online sales grew 21% from January to June, compared to the same period last year. Cloud adoption grew by 70%; IT spending related to remote work is projected to grow to $332.9 billion.
All that translates to a familiar theme: the digital economy is becoming the standard way of doing business, across languages, industries and cultures.
That brings great opportunity for businesses — the whole world is your market — but challenges, particularly with language. English speakers only make up about a quarter of internet users worldwide.
As the world changes and companies become more global and digital, they can’t afford to ignore the fact that they’ll need to communicate in the many languages of the internet.
According to a recent study from Intercom, only 28% of these new global customers can get native language support. That’s despite the fact that 70% of people would feel more loyal with it – and 35% said they’d switch products altogether to receive support in their own language.
When something goes wrong, how can your new customers get the help they need and want?
The solution to the problem lies in Language Operations, otherwise known as LangOps. Today, most organizations still rely on a siloed approach to language.
For example, the marketing team might use translation services, while the sales team hires native speakers and the customer service department staffs up with native-speaking BPOs. There’s no single language strategy that spans the entire organization. That leads to massive inefficiencies that can be solved with technology.
That’s where language operations come in: it’s a cross-disciplinary function that helps global businesses communicate more effectively with their multilingual customers and stakeholders, designed to work for every department across an organization.
LangOps leverages existing tools in the technology stack (in customer service, that’s tools like Zendesk, Helpshift, and more) to help everyday people communicate in any language. It’s a discipline that can help businesses grow more effectively, using data to drive decisions.
For example, LangOps can help a business understand exactly which languages are in the highest demand so that organizations can support customers better and build stronger relationships. For companies trying to find new markets for products, local language, and cultural norms still matter.
As LangOps technology democratizes language even further, every company will be able to function like a multinational corporation and do business anywhere. In the near future, we’ll see AI powering business operations beyond the customer service organization – across functions like sales, marketing, and more. As a result, more companies will be able to test product fit in more markets. And language becomes an asset, rather than a barrier, to doing international business.
Consensus is growing that technology will become the great equalizer for language around the globe. There’s a surge in demand for language learning apps like Duolingo, and growing excitement around multilingual artificial intelligence models like GPT-3, as well as more recent advancements from Google and Facebook. In other words, we’re all seeking universal understanding in different ways.
In 2021 and beyond, the category of language operations will grow as research in the machine learning field for language continues to take off. The ultimate goal? Empower organizations of any size to reach the scale and measurability of a sophisticated, multinational corporation.