Who Owns Your International Customer Journey?
If it's no one person's top priority, it's not a top priority
Who is the most senior person in your organization who bangs the drum for your international customers? Perhaps your CEO, your Head of Product, Head of Marketing, Head of Sales or Head of International? There’s no right answer, but ideally, there is *someone*.
In so many organizations, “international” is the second or third priority for many senior leaders, but is no-one’s top priority. This is a problem and is an indicator that the organization may not be serious about driving international success.
Let’s think through what it means to be accountable for international success, how to start mapping the international customer journey and how you can become a champion for your international customers, no matter your role and seniority.
Who’s Accountable?
Sales leaders have a brutally difficult job in most organizations. Their performance review is largely metrics-driven, and in most cases, the numbers are unambiguous and unforgiving. Everyone knows if a revenue target is hit or missed, or if pipeline target are met or not.
For international growth and expansion, it’s rarely so simple. Many companies will have vague, aspirational objective that are categorized as “International Goals”. But often, these are not well defined or easily measurable. “Win in Japan” or “Grow in Latin America” or “Expand to EMEA” is a slogan, not a real goal.
The problem is usually caused by the absence of a single, accountable individual. The key word here is accountable: directly responsible. It’s crucial that one person is tasked with owning the result to achieve international growth success, and be empowered to make it happen.
A singular, accountable leader can rally the company around the international targets that are identified. They can work to cajole, influence, delegate other leaders to deliver their essential contributions and projects that will be required to achieve success.
Without a single leader, true international success is almost impossible to achieve. Consider a couple of scenarios:
You may have a stellar sign up flow and personalized, hyper-local on-boarding experience, only for it to fall apart because your checkout experience is designed for US audiences only.
Or, you might deliver a wonderful Marketing campaign that uses local social media influencers and culturally-relevant brand adaptations, only to discover that your app performance is so slow, it’s almost unusable in your target market.
Perhaps your new in-market Sales team starts generating a raft of new leads, but your website isn’t localized and you’re missing a Solution Engineer or Support team to help on-board customers in their native language
I’ve seen these stories play out, and it leads to frustration and missed opportunity all round. Worst of all, it shows a lack of joined-up-thinking or customer-centricity for your international customers.
In the scenarios above, it’s probable that no-one failed in their job - it was a natural result of different leaders prioritizing in the abstract, without seeing the bigger picture.
Mapping the International Customer Journey
If there is no single person owning the customer journey, a good place to start is to actually map it out. The international journey is not a set of disparate, functional steps.
No customer will consume Help content without navigating through the Marketing website or the application. Yet this is how localization tends to happen - it’s treated as functional steps, aligned to each department. It’s a form of Conway’s Law, where the organization’s org chart tends to determine how international customers consume content and experiences.
Don’t ship your org chart to your international customers!
The best place to start is by walking in your customers’ shoes. Start by thinking about the end-to-end, holistic journey that your international customers take. This includes:
Using an IP switcher to search for your solution on some of the most-used search engines to inspect the results
Are the results localized appropriately?
How do competitors show up?
Are you listed in all the right search engines?
Are you using the right keywords?
Landing on your Marketing webpage with local language browser settings and walking through your website
Is *everything* localized? If not, where are the gaps?
Are local customers featured?
Is the value proposition tailored for the market?
Reviewing support - phone / email / chat - to see what’s available or not
Inspecting help documentation to ensure it meets expectations
Signing up and walking through the product
Are there US-centric features on show?
Are the Marketing emails localized and tailored?
Purchasing the product
Can you use local currency?
Is the price appropriate for the market?
Can you use local payment methods?
Running through a demo or trial
Can I speak to a Sales or Support person in my language?
Is there a downloadable report or document in my language?
Is the trial set up for my language appropriately with relevant examples?
When you gain clarity on the gaps and spaces for improvement in your international customers’ journey, and the true end-to-end experience, you can start becoming an advocate.
Becoming a Champion for International Customers
The best examples of international growth and success tend to be driven by strong leaders who were passionate about the international customer. They may not have had full ownership for each of the constituent parts of the customer journey, but took accountability for making international successful.
In GoDaddy, James Carroll led the effort to make International Growth a top priority for the company, and explicitly made the end-to-end customer experience the key driver of success. This required rallying the entire company around top level goals, and having a singular point of contact ultimately accountable.
At HubSpot, Nataly Kelly demonstrated the value of expanding her role to move from Localization leadership to Marketing leadership. Nataly showed how focusing on the customer experience was central to achieving success and placed international growth at the heart of her journey and focus.
Beyond having a single point of contact, there are avenues for anyone who is passionate about the international user to step up and become a champion. Here’s where to start:
Conduct a localization experience audit (walk through the experience and document every step)
Create a walkthrough video showcasing your website, app and experience in a single language
Build an international dashboard that tracks key company or product metrics for your top 5-10 countries
Start talking to international customers. Consider starting with Sales calls or Support calls, then move on to Research calls
Create International Customer Profiles. Your ideal customer profile was likely designed with an English-speaking, US-based customer in mind. Your ICP may be different in Japan or Italy or Argentina
Create an International Voice of the Customer Forum. Use this to listen to international sales leaders, support personnel and customer success managers that represent your key regions. Document and review their top issues
Select a market and a metric to improve in 1 quarter. Demonstrate that focusing on international growth is worth further investment. Start with localizing a Marketing campaign or experimenting with adapting CTAs for quick wins
Build a market classification matrix that defines cohorts and segments of your most important markets
Engage with local employees or vendors to conduct performance tests of your website in different countries on all platforms and document blackspots
Test your localized competitor products and websites (including local players) and see where you are falling down
A Call To Action
Once you have assembled some or all of the information above, you need to start sharing. As often and as loudly as possible. The international growth opportunity for most companies is the largest blind spot that exists.
Ask questions in Town Halls; ask Marketing what their international SEO strategy looks like; ask Product leaders how many customers outside the US they are talking to.
Share your findings, share your data and start advocating for more time, resources and energy to be dedicated to improving the international customer journey. If possible, volunteer to own it and start improving it, little by little.
So many companies profess to be customer-obsessed, yet spend little time obsessing over international customers. This is an opportunity to start.