sme sitdown interview: geofluent services
DESCRIPTION
We sat down with subject matter expert (SME) Greg Belkin, Director of Product Marketing for the GeoFluent group. We wanted to ask Greg some questions to help us understand what GeoFluent is all about and how it can help our customers accomplish their chat and forum translation goals. Check out this slideshare presentation for further details. For full audio of the interview check out the last slide.TRANSCRIPT
“My official title is Director of Product Marketing. I work in the Geofluent Group. I’ve been here for about five, six months
now. I’m responsible for all of the marketing outreach that we do for the
Geofluent product line. I’ve focused on lead generation. I focus on partner relationships
and I focus on anything market-wise that helps promote Geofluent as a brand and in
turn, Lionbridge.”-Greg Belkin
“That’s a great question, so Geofluent focuses on bridging the language gap for
our global companies. For a lot of companies, in their customer service
outreach, they have to appeal and build outreach to a lot of different types of users and those users can be here in the United
States, they can be in China or Japan or any other location. They can be in Central America, they can speak a variety of
different languages. Geofluent’s main goal is to help so that people can share
knowledge above and beyond and not worry about the language gap.”-Greg Belkin
“It’s everywhere, and it’s actually delivered in three main mechanisms, three main
channels. One is Geofluent Chat Translator. The other is Geofluent Form Translator. And
finally, the third which is a product that we’ve just recently refocused on and come up with is the Geofluent Text Translator. So
people who come to a website and they want to ask a question, they can go to their forums and post the question in, and they want to search for an answer, they go to
the forums. They don’t have to worry about a particular answer being written in Chinese
or Japanese or Spanish or French. Geofluent really gives them the ability to
take that language and translate it into any language that will be appropriate for them
to read and understand.”-Greg Belkin
“There’s a lot of options that people have and customer service is really where the
rubber meets the road in terms of outreach to the customer. So Geofluent helps them
improve the customer service by uniting all of the services that people need and help
they need under one banner so that language is not a problem. It’s a global experience, there can be one body of
knowledge that satisfies everybody versus having multiple different ones in multiple
different languages.”-Greg Belkin
“The biggest challenge, I think, is being able to provide the right amount of customer
service to the user. I think they want to be able to go at them at every single point of
contact whether it’s on the phone, whether it’s in chat, whether it’s on a forum, there needs to be one uniform way of reaching
out to the customer and providing a seamless experience so I think that that’s
the biggest challenge that our users have, is making sure that no area is confusing for
anybody, that it’s mapped to a specific experience, all the answers are the same, all the languages is the same. And if you take the language challenge out of there, that becomes much easier.”-Greg Belkin
“We work with them to create what are called “do not translates” or DNTs. And we work on creating a list of everything that they don’t want translated. Now, if you’re
talking about a customer with a lot of different codes and a lot of different pieces
of script that they’re talking about and exchanging ideas on, that is crucial.”-Greg
Belkin
“They can set up specified lists for the GeoFluent feature. We work with our
clients beforehand and during the process. We help identify which pieces of language map to which pieces of language. The DNT list is based on very specific language that they provide or that we work to provide
with them. This helps them fill in the language based on some prewritten rules
and some prewritten context.”-Greg Belkin
“Very efficient, we solved for a situation where there was a pain point a client had. At the time there were so many pieces of
content in so many different languages that they couldn’t help users. So we stepped in and assisted by making sure a person who
spoke the language was on the other end of the questions being asked.”-Greg Belkin
“It’s really gratifying to me to see a customer who went from struggling to
share content to being able to reach the masses. It’s not so much about who buys
what product. For me, it’s all about helping customers solve a problem that they have,
and that’s really the essence behind Geofluent.”-Greg Belkin
“Toad World was a great example. They are a company that’s trying to do a favor for everybody else by reaching that global
audience and say, “If you need help with a piece of code or you’re building an
application, we can help you do that by searching our knowledge base.” And so it’s not just, from the perspective of an English user looking for some content that might be
written in Chinese, it’s really a service for everybody at the other end just as much as
it is for the US. ”-Greg Belkin
“Chinese is very popular, as well as Spanish and French. ”-Greg Belkin
“The biggest issue that I have that worries me is name recognition for the product. Geofluent is one of the best-kept secrets out there, and my job here is to try and
change that. I think we offer such a service and do such a favor to organizations. Any organization that sells beyond one border
can benefit from Geofluent. Any organization that uses a forum to globally communicate with their users can benefit from Geofluent. So my job, my focus, my
worry is to get the name out and make sure people understand that these kinds of
services are available. ”-Greg Belkin
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