MAIDENHEAD, England,
December 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --
SDL Research
Suggests Customers Expect Continuous Digital
Experiences: Global Brands can deliver this
with Latest Process and Automation
Innovations across the Content
Supply Chain
SDL (LSE: SDL), a global leader in content creation, translation
and delivery, today reveals that its Five Future States of Content
(#5FutureStates) have become a reality, after a series of its
innovations that have been incubated over the past year have begun
to deliver solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI) and
machine learning (ML). These developments, which span across the
content supply chain, not only help global brands move from manual
to autonomous futures as they evolve towards a global content
operating model (GCOM), but enable them to create compelling
content that drives continuous customer experiences.
"Early in 2018, SDL announced its Five Future States of Content,
a series of concepts predicting exciting prospects where content
will create itself, organize itself, secure itself, be agile and be
an organization's best salesperson, with some of these predictions
already a reality today," said Peggy
Chen, CMO at SDL. "What makes the difference in the accuracy
of our predictions is SDL's unwavering commitment to meet
customers' needs and laser-focus on leading the way in what's next
on content creation, translation and delivery - bringing to
fruition concepts that were just a mere idea a little over a year
ago. To highlight where investment is needed, we also provide
insight into our upcoming research, which identifies rising
customer expectations in seamless experiences. Here's how our
predictions and research fared."
- Content will
create
itself: Content makes the digital world
go around, and drives every stage of the customer journey, from
research through to purchase, product use and ongoing support. And
it needs to be available 24/7. According to
SDL's commissioned research, 82% of customers
expect brands to be available whenever needed. If
it's not, a third (27%) will
simply stop their purchase. However, for most companies, the
biggest challenge lies in keeping up with demand and finding better
ways to create, translate and deliver content. SDL predicted that
with the rise of AI, there was potential to get more value out of
the content already produced, by giving brands the ability to
create content derivatives which resonate with more audiences
worldwide.
What SDL delivered: Alongside people and advancing
processes, the launch of SDL Content Assistant, powered by Hai,
SDL's Linguistic AI, automates, accelerates and enhances the
derivative content creation process. The content assistant quickly
identifies themes, patterns and main ideas from source
documentation and extracts key topics; automatically identifying
key content elements such as quotes, facts and figures, and
providing content summaries, which can be used for blogs and social
posts.
- Content will be agile: Keeping up with consumer
demand means creating content around the clock in the right
formats. SDL's research shows 57% of consumers
surveyed read product/services specifications online and 39% read
product/service documentation (pdfs and paper manuals). To meet
consumer demand, companies must streamline handoffs between content
creation, translation, and delivery and create an efficient and
agile GCOM.
What SDL delivered: By combining new ways of agile
working with componentized content, automated and integrated
translation capabilities, and linguistic AI, brands can enable
agile content creation, translation and delivery like never before.
As an example, SDL's recently launched end-to-end localization
platform, SDL Language Cloud, changes the traditional approach to
managing content projects to achieve greater agility, helping users
think about their processes and automate them.
- Content will organize
itself: While everyone relies on content, too much
becomes inconsumable and unmanageable. When asked about their best
digital experiences with brands, SDL research respondents
pointed out the following features: Ease of website search and
pre-filtered content, logical categorization and clear, accurate
product information. However, 66% said they have abandoned a
purchase due to insufficient product information. AI will help
structure, classify and tag content in a way that it becomes highly
organized and searchable across the business.
What SDL delivered: With the new SDL Tridion DX,
which combines the power of SDL Tridion Sites and SDL Tridion Docs,
companies can today use shared taxonomies across content types for
marketing and product content, ensuring better search results,
targeted content, consistency with industry standards and term
bases, as well as better reporting. SDL's Linguistic AI, Hai, also
provides additional support to taxonomies and tagging - all
enabling companies to organize their content better both internally
and externally.
- Content will be secure: With nearly 60 million
Americans affected by identity theft, according to a 2018 online
survey by the Harris Poll (The Harris Poll, 2018),
companies need to protect translation processes and ensure they do
not expose sensitive, protected or confidential information through
copying, transmission or use by unauthorized individuals. AI will
help apply the correct category tagging to ensure regulatory
compliance and ensure no personal data goes through an insecure
process.
What SDL delivered: SDL launched a series of secure
deployments for its Neural Machine Translation (MT) platform,
introducing Edge Cloud capabilities that seamlessly connect the
on-premises MT environment to provide secure ground-to-cloud
deployment flexibility. Additionally, SDL's Secure Translation
Supply Chain and Content Management technology is designed with
security in mind. Organizations concerned with data breaches can
work in the comfort of knowing their data is locked down throughout
the translation process.
- Content will be your best salesperson: Online,
every sale is ultimately built on content. More sales increases
demands and content complexities. Today, more than 70% of
consumers surveyed by SDL have experienced issues with content
online including language barriers, lack of customization and
inability to find the right content. Brands will need to ensure
their content is impactful, and engages across the customer
journey.
What SDL delivered: SDL has listened to the recurring
issues by consumers and has made it easier to meet the increase in
content volumes while also driving the customer experience by
scaling content creation, translation, and delivery. By using SDL's
network of in-country linguistic resources, combined with content
and translation technology, such as Linguistic AI and Machine
Translation, organizations can create content once and then
multiply the amount of content by the number of target languages
without risk to the brand or the relevancy of their message. This
is made easy with SDL Tridion DX, SDL Accessibility Solution -
which enables content accessibility across every channel - and SDL
Multilingual Website solution, which enables organizations to
experiment with automatically translated web pages and identify
which content should be sent for more refined human translation…
and all without having to increase headcount.
"Our ambition is to build a model for our customers that deliver
machine first, human optimized GCOM solutions, taking the content
operating model from manual to automated. Our 2018 predictions set
out a blueprint for this and paved the way for new solutions
designed to bring the five future states of content closer to a
reality. In 2019, we will take more steps in helping our customers
create exceptional customer journeys by making predictions on the
future content landscape, so watch this space!" concluded Chen.
About SDL
SDL (LSE: SDL) is the global leader in content creation,
translation and delivery. For over 25 years we've helped companies
communicate with confidence and deliver transformative business
results by enabling powerful experiences that engage customers
across multiple touchpoints worldwide. Are you in the know? Find
out why 88 of the top 100 global companies work with and trust us
on SDL.com. Follow us
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