Breaking the Language Barrier

An enormous growth opportunity exists to expand global sales reach by communicating with customers in their native language

The first step of every sales transaction is communication; the better the communication, the better the chance of a sale occurring, and the better the communication during and after a sale, the better the chance of a sale occurring again. To boost the sale of a product or service, a customer must first understand it—whether by reading about it via print literature, website or social media platform, or speaking with a company representative, or somebody else who knows or heard about it.

About 73 percent of the world’s online population is made up of non-native English speakers, so in order to get those potential customers to learn about your product or service, you need to overcome the burden of the language barrier. Using e-commerce, even small companies can easily expand their global reach, but if their online platform only caters to English-speaking consumers, they’re only communicating with about 27 percent of the global consumer base. This is the reason that the demand for language services technology continues to climb alongside a 19 percent increase in international e-commerce sales.

One Way to Get Your Potential Customers Yappn

Yappn is a real-time language services technology company that specializes in helping brands and online communities connect freely on multiple digital platforms without a language barrier. Recently, it launched a new e-commerce platform. This new disruptive service covers the entire transactional experience—from pre-sales marketing and brand messaging to e-commerce search to shopping cart checkout and post-sales support—all in the customers’ native language. As part of the initial launch, brands including Ethika, Rocksmith, Yeah Nice, Wu-Tang Clan and Ezekiel are leveraging Yappn’s new e-commerce service and integrating it into their existing online sales platforms.

According to Yappn CEO David Lucatch, “Yappn breaks down communication silos, helping brands to scale their business globally online—be it through social media, e-commerce sales and/or support services—and allows for people with similar interests, likes and ideas to converse without a language barrier. Yappn provides companies with the ability to communicate better on a global scale with new and existing customers, leading to immediate financial growth opportunities.”

Yappn is a real-time multilingual company that amplifies brand messaging, helps conduct commerce and provides customer support by globalizing these experiences with its proprietary approach to language. Through its real-time multilingual amplification platform, Yappn eliminates the language barrier, allowing the free flow of communications in nearly 70 languages. Yappn developed unique and proprietary technology tools and services that create dynamic solutions that enhance a brands messaging, media, and e-commerce and support platforms.

Lucatch says, “We saw a huge growth opportunity for companies to expand their global sales reach by being able to communicate with customers’ in their native language throughout the transaction experience (marketing, sales and support) and that’s why we developed Yappn’s e-commerce offering. With the help of Yappn’s real-time language services technology, a variety of brands now have the ability to access new markets and increase revenue streams.

“When you look at the U.S. market, where is the growth area? The Hispanic market. What better way to connect with that growth sector than to converse with them in their native language? In reverse, global regions (Europe, Asia, etc.) want to access U.S. commerce and Yappn provides them a partner to authentically connect and grow revenue.”

How Yappn Works

Yappn has nearly 70 languages in its arsenal, spanning from those that are widely spoken to those that are less universally recognized. According to Lucatch, “The vast majority of online global conversations happens in 13 languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese (EU), Portuguese (SA), Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Russian. The most common languages we translate into are English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and German.”

 “Yappn is built from the ground up on a cloud-based system to maximize speed and efficiencies in delivering language services,” explains Lucatch. “From there, our proprietary algorithms and lexicons (based on individual businesses and/or verticals) work to understand the meaning and interpretation of the message or sales inquiry on a number of levels, and then to return in real time the meaning and spirit of the message, not just the literal translation.”

The technology is more intricate, and therefore accurate, than your basic online translators because it goes beyond word-for-word translation to more elaborately infer the intended message for more seamless, fluid communication. Lucatch says, “The technology of Yappn gets more accurate as our systems learn from user experiences and update lexicons. With the use of our proprietary algorithms, the message is translated by identifying the core focus as well as the literal translation.”

Another benefit of the Yappn technology is that it is customized to the needs of each user and integrates freely into existing platforms. “Yappn’s language services technology can be integrated into a brands’ most major social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), e-commerce suites and customer support programs like LivePerson,” adds Lucatch. “Yappn’s technology allows parties to communicate and consume content in their native language in real time for a seamless experience. With Yappn, there is no cutting and pasting, waiting for someone to interpret a message, or sending a message out for translation.”

Yappn Covers the Multilingual Spectrum

“Yappn’s e-commerce services cover the entire transaction experience suite, working with clients to globalize their social outreach and monitoring, e-commerce catalog, site, lexicon, and shopping cart and online customer services. This approach gives our clients a 360-degree view of the customers and the experience their customers have in a native language environment,” according to Lucatch.

If a company looking to break the language barrier decided to hire an interpreter for the same services that Yappn provides, Lucatch compares it like this, “A potential customer would need in and around eight people per language in staffing/hours/responsibilities allocation to cover a 24/7 environment that includes marketing, sales and support. This is a tremendous burden to most growing enterprises. Yappn allows enterprises to expand globally without the need for extensive staff changes.”

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