My youngest son asked me this question the other week and I had to tell him that whilst English is the most prevalent language around the world, it's not the only one. Which raises a very interesting point.
Typically, we see two types of Customers:
Globalizing Customers
Those who have multiple user-bases with requirements for languages other than English
Natively non-English Customers
Imagine a French customer in France or a Japanese Customer in Japan, so they have next to no need for English.
Let's go through both concepts and review what their different needs might be.
Globalizing Customers
The high-level concept here is the idea of a Company can be any where in the world and they have some sort of operations in another country. That essentially means they have a need to perform said operations in another language for a portion of their given user-base (internal or external).
Let's use some real-world inspired examples:
External customer needs:
A Company has an externally facing support organisation for their main business service. This support capability is presented to 45+ countries which requires;
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A Portal to allow their customers to interact with their support organisation and seek help when necessary, -
Support documentation - imagine a dedicated KB for the regional specific content, -
A Chat bot - VA topics, -
Real-time Agent chat - Agent chat -
Request-able services - Service Catalogs & Record Producers
At the same time, the in-country support teams need to be able to see, reference, find and interact with both these customers and the business. So, if a customer has raised a case in Spanish the support teams need to be able to find a solution to it and respond back in Spanish, whilst also being able to follow escalation paths that might be in English if an SME (Subject Matter Expert) is required, which naturally is situationally dependent.
With this very high-level 100,000ft view of the needs, we can see that the platform does have products and offerings to meet these needs. CSM has a nice Portal for external users to interact with the business, either navigating their way around and searching for Guides / Info (Knowledge Articles) or the thing they would like to request (Catalog Items / Record Producers) what they are looking for (this is the concept of "self-service" because no Agent has been interacted with yet), a VA Chat can be added to the portal which can also lead to an Agent chat if necessary.
The agents themselves can use the powerful (and configurable) Agent Workspace to keep all the tools they need in one place, to make things as efficient as possible.
Since Covid-19 many companies have found themselves in the situation where they need to adopt these models in order to grow the business. These types of business transformations used to take years, and yet we see and hear stories daily on how Company A and Company B recognised the need, pivoted and performed the seemingly impossible in weeks or months rather than years. It's also important to state, that this type of situation is for practically any industry. It could be Manufacturing, Tech, Finance, Social Media, Medical, Pharma, Automotive, Media etc.
Internal customer needs:
A Company has a growing employee base in multiple countries and they've recognised they can hire better talent when they remove English as the barrier. Meaning, if they consider hiring those who have the skills they are after but can't necessarily speak English fluently, then their talent pool will likely significantly improve.
So, the internal HR organisation would require:
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A Portal to replace their legacy "intranet" - HR has the Exployee Center (and Pro), -
Support documentation, detailing internal company policies and procedures for employees to find and follow, -
Request-able services, -
Maybe in the future they could add a Chat bot like functionality, -
As the support organisation matures their processes and hiring capability they could look to add real-time Agent
chat on top of the Bot, -
And of course the Agent's would need an optimised UI to work in.
For those reading this and who know the platform, you can already see some business concepts that are very similar to the "external" example above.
I often liken the platform to a famous Danish toy brand, where the platform is the base-plate and all the products, features and capabilities are the different types of building blocks. Knowing what each does and how they can all come together lets you build a house vs a gleaming glass office tower of your choosing.
This is even more apparent when that exact concept is followed, meaning start with that "base-plate" then iterate in small building blocks often, weekly, maybe even daily.
What we've seen over the years, is that the most successful (in terms of speed, adoption and pivoting) are those who start small, like really small, practically just ootb. To make a solid MVP, then constantly bring new features often and quickly. You'll also likely find that those who don't follow strict Waterfall and instead follow Agile / DevOps with flexibility are in that camp. The reason being is that business needs are likely changing daily, maybe even hourly - such as with the Pandemic's lockdown requirements, which I might go into in another post about how I nearly got stuck in Dublin.
Natively non-English Customers
This is pretty self explanatory, in that their non-English needs are present regardless (hence our Language Packs). However, these customers also need to think of all of the above as well.
If not English?
According to Statista, in a report published in Jan 2021 (this year), English made up just 25.9% of languages used on the Internet. Chinese is listed as 2nd with 19.4% because (according to the report authors) China as a country has the most amount of internet users for any Country, followed by Spanish at 7.9%.
It's no surprise then, that we see so many Companies look to adopt multiple languages for multiple use-cases and needs, which would almost certainly be due to an imperative need or business opportunity. Either way it is happening and faster since the pandemic started.
Summary
When I started my ServiceNow journey (10 years ago in March) the platform just covered predominantly ITSM use-cases. At times I found it a bit daunting to learn what everything was. However, what I found as the best way to understand the capabilities of the platform was to break down everything into those aforementioned building blocks.
It doesn't matter if you're reading this as a Platform Owner, Service Owner, System Administrator, App Developer, Technical Consultant, Process Consultant or someone learning in the ecosystem, my best advice is to learn what the building blocks can do e.g:
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what does a Business Rule actually do? - it can query a value in a table (this or another) to influence this process
(or another), -
what's a UI Policy for? - it can make my fields on this form read-only, mandatory or visible based on conditions, -
fields and their types? - types for certain needs, if I need a reference-able choice is it better to just have a choice
field with option in sys_choice or create a lookup table so I can use it somewhere else if necessary? And if a field
is on a table, does it have to be on a form? (tip - no it doesn't), -
dot-walking? etc
Here is a massive over-simplification of what I mean so as to show how the language aspect sits on-top of those same building-blocks:
This is because if you ever need to perform a business pivot, following the concept above about everything the platform offers will give you the arsenal of knowing precisely what those building blocks are for, how powerful they are and how they can be used in certain products on offer, meaning if/when the time comes you'll know exactly what to implement, adapt and expand and therefore use to its fullest.
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