During the Team’22 event in Las Vegas, Atlassian recognized ITSM Issue Translation for JSM with the ITSM App of the year award. The award celebrates an app that “enhances Atlassian tools to help customers succeed with ITSM solutions” and “is being positioned and marketed to customers as part of an ITSM solution“.
In the community post that highlights the award winners, Atlassian has also shared that the app “stood out to us because it supports distributed teams across multiple countries and languages. The app automatically translates customer tickets and agent replies, so customers and support teams can communicate seamlessly in 100+ languages.“
Yes, in a nutshell, that’s what the app does. If I had 3 bullet points to summarize they would be the following:
- Allow customers and agents to communicate across different languages
- Classify your customer requests by languages so they can be assigned, analyzed, and tracked
- Provide a localized customer experience in the JSM Customer Portal
An app for a global audience
Any organization with a global footprint can benefit from the app. From small firms to large corporations, seamless communication is vital when you’re working with partners, customers or colleagues from a different region. The app is particularly useful when:
- Some or all of your customers or partners don’t speak your business language.
- Your customers can actually communicate with you in your business language – but they still prefer to use their mother tongue.
- You don’t have the resources to hire agents that speak your customer’s language.
In many industries outside tech, English is not that common. Blue collar employees are a good example. Support for warehouse workers and the like must be native… or it won’t happen.
The marketing engine
Is the market ready for real-time translations?
One of the differential aspects of this app was how we marketed it.
We know that communicating with customers is a very delicate subject, so we wanted to make sure that the market was ready for automated translations. We surveyed over 300 professionals and discovered interesting insights:
- Most respondents can’t tell an automated translation from a native message.
- The younger the users, the happier they are to engage with real time translations.
- Native communication is preferred also by fluent English speakers. Even if it implies an automated translation process.
- Localized support is a powerful retention tactic in industries like e-commerce, where most users prefer to purchase in their native language.
Translations throughout the customer journey
We knew that our translation app would only be as powerful as its reach. So we decided to invest in partnerships to amplify the story.
As a result of our collaboration with Appfire, we hosted a live webinar that demoed a multilingual chatbot built with three apps: our translation app, Chat for JSM, and Canned Responses Pro Templates.
Translating other Atlassian applications
Expanding translations beyond customer-agent conversations was a natural thing to do. For the last Codegeist hackathon, our developers created a sister app that translates issues for Jira Software and Jira Work Management.
Issue Translation for Jira serves the same purpose: supporting distributed teams. Only this time, the focus is not on customer support, but rather on internal collaboration. This app is a better fit for multinational organizations: users from acquired companies that didn’t have English as a business language can stick to their local languages and have their issues and comments translated in no time.
What’s coming
The Atlassian award motivates us to keep growing and marketing the app as an integral part of any global ITSM implementation. We’re working on more integrated workflows with other Atlassian products like Confluence and Halp; and with Marketplace apps that many customers are already using.
Stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter if you want to know more!
