TAUS and the Consortium for Service Innovation co-hosted the first joint Global Support Summit in Berlin, bringing together players working in customer support and the TAUS community of translation buyers, technology providers and translation and localization practitioners.
The purpose was to:
- To collectively share insights and intelligence and come with creative solutions to the issues, challenges and opportunities in global customer support.
- To establish, for the first time, 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 exchange current best practices and identify issues that would benefit from additional research.
- To lay a foundation for continued collaboration.
All of these initial goals were achieved in varying degrees. The content combined presentations of user cases and current automation solutions, followed by breakout sessions covering issues raised and coordinated by the group.
Feedback from these intensive discussions was then synthesized into a set of topic threads available in an online workspace so that ideas and collaboration around specific problem areas and actual joint projects could grow and evolve in anticipation of a second Joint Support Summit.
Interim conclusions
The customer support (CS) community uses the KCS (Knowledge Centric Support) process while it is at the same time shifting to a more networked, community-driven user environment. This means implementing a language-rich agenda in an increasingly global world. One of the key CS issues is to build trust with this fluid community. Language/culture sensitivity will be vital.
The localization and translation service community needs to examine how it can provide solutions that address this evolving customer support context. A key thread is to streamline the language automation process, and grounding tools and technologies in an understanding of the "knowledge workflow" and source content underpinning support in a swarming, cloud model.
Localization and customer support as functions in corporate and institutional organizations are gradually converging. To ensure a better mutual understanding and stimulate creation of synergies Greg Oxton and Jaap van der Meer, the directors of the Consortium and TAUS, started collaboration, running joint events and sharing research and reports.
Full report exclusively available to TAUS members >>> Global Support Summit Berlin - June 2008