Location and date to be announced
Co-hosted by the Consortium for Service Innovation & the Translation Automation User Society
The goal of the 2010 Summit is to identify opportunities to optimize the investment most companies have already made in localization and translation by applying it to the global support and customer interaction processes. The Global Support Optimization Summit is the place where insights in global customer trends are translated into service innovation and cost benefits.
Following the success of the Global Support Summit in Berlin (June 11-13, 2008), TAUS and the Consortium for Service Innovation are now organizing the second Global Support Summit, provisionarily scheduled for February 2010.
The Global Support Summit is a small-scale event (maximum 60 participants) attended by key managers and decision makers representing the localization and customer support and interaction organizations.
Theme: Localization and Customer Support Convergence
The convergence of Localization and customer interaction is an opportunity to reduce costs and increase market reach and presence. As organizations leverage the web for self-service and user communities the opportunity for translation and localization increases. The degree to which we can use translation automation reduces the costs of serving global markets with both the traditional support model as well as with the growing online customer engagement strategies.
The challenge we face is driven by the following trends:
- Continued globalization of business. Most large companies generate more than 50% of their business from ‘foreign' markets. Localization and translation is a requirement to sustain and grow the business.
- The content explosion. The pace of product updates combined with user-centric publishing has created a dramatic increase in the volume and types of content we have to deal with. The traditional vendor-centric, push model of publishing is no longer effective.
- Localization cost justification. The cost of human-based translation of content is prohibitive.
The solution we are pursuing is the integration of machine translation and localization practices with the global support processes to improve customer support efficiency and reach:
- Automation. The use of machine translation capabilities in the customer support environment will boost the efficiency of support in serving foreign markets.
- Content framework. Understanding the types of content and their life cycle can help us identify where to apply translation and localization
- Process - a demand based model. With a clear understanding of the content and the customer demand or use of the content, we can better identify the high value content and apply machine translation and localization efforts in an optimal way.
Topics
The Global Support Optimization Summit 2010 will address the following topics:
Automation
- Automatic translation in a Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) environment. Following last year's Global Support Summit pilot tests were done with MT technology on KCS content. A report on this pilot project will be presented.
- Different approaches and good practices to using translation technology for knowledge bases and support web sites.
- Sharing language data (translation memories and terminology) on an industry-wide basis as a way to streamline industry terminology, increase user satisfaction, reduce support and translation costs.
Content framework
- Mapping the landscape of content and its attributes; types, sources, medium, life cycle.
- Good practices in managing quality, style and terminology at the content source lead to significant savings in machine translation.
- The intersection between customer interaction channels and multilingual requirements; phone, email, chat and online communities or forums. translation as innovative solutions in global customer support. Technologies, use cases and practices.
Process - a demand base model
- Solving issues of culture and language in global networks connecting people with content and people with people. Use cases and good practices illustrating the structural shift from hierarchy to a community approach to support.
- Practices and statistics in ‘crowdsourcing' customer support in a multi-lingual and cross-cultural environment. How to get the right resources working on problem resolution and engaging users through online communities to do translation based on usage.
- Measuring translation quality. Linguistic quality metrics or simple user feedback, what makes most sense and how to find the right balance.
- Key Performance Indicators in global customer support. Value of the customer cloud versus the productivity of the call center. Use cases and good practices illustrating the changing perspective on the value of support.
- Financial considerations and scales of economy in merging localization and customer support.
Objectives
The objectives of the Global Support Summit are:
- To exchange current best practices in global support process and translation practices. Identify opportunities to integrate and optimize the practices.
- To establish a common platform for customer support and localization-globalization managers. This will create an interdisciplinary field for experts in customer support and international business to collaborate.
- To lay a foundation for continued research and develop case studies that demonstrate incremental economic benefits.
Call for papers
Parties interested in presenting use cases, practices and technologies at this Global Support Summit are invited to submit a paper. Topics should match with the theme and the topics listed in the program. All papers will be reviewed and evaluated by the Program Committee.
Setting
Dalian City, hosting the 2009 Global Support Summit, is sometimes referred to as the San Francisco of China. Dalian City, located on the Yellow Sea, is a Development Zone that has attracted many large foreign investors in recent years from high-tech, finance, life sciences. In particular it is an area where many companies have already set up their global customer support operations. It is also known as a multilingual center for Asian languages, thanks to its geographical vicinity to Korea and Japan. (see further: the Wikipedia site on Dalian)
The Global Support Summit will be held at the five star Swissôtel (RMB750, including service charge and breakfast). Address of the hotel: No.21, Wuhui Road, Zhongshan District. The Dalian International Zhou Shui Zi Airport has daily connections to Beijing, Shanghai and Seoul (60 to 90 minutes flights).
The Global Support Summit is co-hosted by the Consortium for Service Innovation and TAUS. It is a non-sponsored event. The Summit brings together around 50 senior managers with a background in support, international business and globalization in corporate and institutional organizations. The Summit will have a mix of presentations about current practices and ‘open space' discussions about the challenges in global support. Presentations and demonstrations are solely made for the purpose of genuinely sharing information, insights and advances in technologies. Commercial pitches will not be tolerated.
Program Committee
The Program Committee for the Global Support Summit 2009 consists of:
- Will Burgett, Intel
- Lew Tarnopol, Intel
- Francis Tsang, Adobe
- Greg Oxton, Consortium for Service Innovation
- Allen Lee, BMC Software
- Doreen Kostel, Verisign
- George Wu, HiSoft
- Lori Brownell - Microsoft
- Vanessa Finegan - Quest Software
- Brett Webster - Alcatel Lucent
- Sean O'Driscoll - CGT Consulting
Time line
Papers for the Global Support Summit 2010 need to be sent before September 20 to
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Registration for the Summit opens on October 1.
Registration
Capacity at the Global Support Summit will be limited to 60 participants. Interested participants are recommended to reserve a seat as early as possible by registering through the TAUS web site. This registration is non-committal until a further email confirmation has been exchanged, but it does guarantee a seat at the Summit. Registration to the Global Support Summit costs € 1,250 for members of TAUS and the Consortium for Service Innovation. (€ 2,500 for non-members). Registration fee includes meetings and working lunches from Wednesday afternoon till Friday afternoon, welcome reception and networking dinner on Wednesday and a formal dinner on Thursday. Interested parties who are not capable of traveling to Dalian City at this time may take part in the presentation sections of the Summit through a webex link. Registration to the web-based Summit costs € 125 for members of TAUS and the Consortium for Service Innovation. (€ 250 for non-members).
*** REGISTER HERE ***
