Scaling Up to Add 1 Billion New Customers

Over 85% people in India do not speak English. That adds up to 1 billion people. Whatever product or service that you may be selling, you need to communicate to your customers in their language. Without localization or globalization whatever you may call it, you cannot scale up your reach beyond English literate customers. No business can afford to ignore such a large customer base.

Unless you have planned for multilingual support in your software design, you may need to invest substantial re-engineering efforts in localizing your portal or the app. This could hamper your scaling up midway through the process. That’ll give your competition an opportunity to leave you behind. Startups need to plan for multi lingual enabled technology right at the beginning of their journey, which ensures that they have access to a much bigger prospect base.

Process 9 helps businesses reach out to one billion customers by localizing your online and mobile properties to Indian languages. We solve 4 major challenges for our customers.

(a) Volume of content: E-commerce companies often have millions of products, service providers and customers. We handle large volumes of content for them and make it cost effective and scalable using our cloud based MOX Wave API.

(b) Easy and quick localization: In many cases where software development has not taken care of multilingual enablement, localization may involve time consuming software re-engineering. Our innovative MOX Gateway technology eliminates need for re-engineering while quickly helping you go live in local languages.

(c) Frequent content and UI changes: Keeping the localized version in step with original site or app can be a constant challenge for businesses. A combination of our MOX Gateway and Wave technology constantly tracks the changes and keeps the language versions updated without any effort from your developers.

(d) High translation and transliteration accuracy: Process 9 makes high quality translations available at affordable costs using its state of the art automated and machine assisted translation technology.

Statistics show that as of June 2015, out of 269 million Internet users, 127 million were local language users, of which 81 million were located in the urban India. Localization therefore is not just a strategy to reach out to the semi-urban and rural users but 47% of urban users prefer to use Internet in native languages. In addition, number of local language Internet users is growing much faster than English language users.

Many businesses take a short cut of skipping localization to begin with and are happy to address a small portion of the country’s population. This strategy may not work in the coming months as non-English speaking smart phone carrying population is fast making their choices and forming loyalty with the businesses that are already offering local language content and UX.

Process 9 makes it easy and cost effective to localize your online and mobile properties without requiring any change of software.

The Mystery of the Internet

Last Sunday, an aged relative who lives in a remote area in Delhi called out of the blue.

While I was pleasantly surprised to hear his voice, he called with a request that was both amusing and appalling.

He said that he had asked his granddaughter to pay his electricity bill for the month ‘on mobile‘, and now had no proof or confirmation on whether it had actually reached the correct authority or not. He was very unsure that something he has been doing by trotting down to Electricity office, stand in the queue and spend half a day doing that can be done in minutes from a phone.

He requested me to ‘check on the internet‘, if his bill had been paid or not.

He had no information about the transaction except his house address. He did not even know the name of his electricity provider.

After I was done chuckling over our dialogue, I searched Google for the service provider for the area he lived in, found out the customer service number and shared it with my uncle for future reference, I was saddened to see how ‘the internet’ was still such a mysterious untrustworthy entity for some – that too in Delhi!

It made me realize how important the task at hand is, and how we’ve not even begun to scratch the surface.

While we take pride in localizing a million mobile devices a month, providing the best keyboards and fonts in 22 Indian Languages, or having translated over two billion words for e-businesses,  the very state we function in has a sizeable population that still does not understand the internet, and the convenience it brings to everyday living.

I am fortunate to have been contacted by my uncle to help him out, but there are so many others who are still to be introduced to the magical world of the internet, Google, Facebook and the millions of apps that keep us glued to our phone screens.

Like the ‘Each One Teach One’ campaign being run by the Education Ministry of India, there is a strong need to start an ‘Each One Teach One’ initiative for internet and mobile device education as well.

Close to 200 million Indians have a smartphone in their pocket, yet a significant percentage carries a small red book with handwritten names and phone numbers. Basic functionalities that we take for granted are still a mystery for them. A magical world awaits to be discovered!

So why don’t we do a good deed and educate someone on one new feature on their smart phone. Not only will we have enabled someone, we will start a chain reaction, where we teach one person, who then teaches two others and so the learning spreads.

Just imagine how wonderful that would be – spreading the virtual network through the human network.

Vidushi Kapoor