Working across various countries and cultures, we regularly explore the differences between global audiences, how they behave and how their technology operates. Customer journey maps are essential in understanding where we disappoint or fail our users, whoever and wherever they are, as damaging any chance to retain customer loyalty is such an important element. Because of that, we’ve created various pages covering customer journey mapping and its dependence on user personas, with a few examples showing how much geography and culture affect the process.
When it comes to breaking new territories, the customer journey mapping process becomes even more dependent on international UX personas. Considering the customer’s journey from a geographical standpoint is only half the battle. Simply translating a website or app into a new language might make the content nearer understandable for the reader, but it doesn’t go anywhere close to understanding the nuances of their language or local dialect, what’s considered acceptable behaviour or what their standard practices look like in their region or city, never mind the additional complications surrounding religions, class culture, and emotional expectations.
Putting your customers’ experience at the heart of a customer journey map
To ensure a successful customer journey map, we need to put the customer’s experience at the forefront of our research, and that means exploring customer needs from their local and cultural standpoint. How many of us can actually put ourselves in our customer’s shoes? It might look fairly straightforward if we live in the same country and have values similar to those of our typical customers. Yet journey mapping uncovers our unseen pain points at the many customer touchpoints we explore.
What might surprise you is that even our nearest European neighbours can think, feel, and act radically differently from us.
For example, in a presentation called Build Bridges, Not Walls, focussing on design for users across cultures, international UX consultant Jenny Shen, a specialist in cross-cultural design and localisation, reveals surprising details about our neighbouring cultures, never mind those across the globe.
Her depth of experience reveals that even how we show emotion while doing business can be worlds apart: some will see friendly touch, laughter, and even raising your voice as natural parts of open negotiation, whereas others will see it as intrusive, unprofessional, and even immature.
For example, in France and Israel, passionate people find it acceptable to let emotions flood out. Conversely, open disagreement is seen as insulting in Brazil, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. In contrast, in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, it’s considered open debate and necessary to reach a compromise and agreement, as long as it’s done calmly, considering the facts, and not overly emotional or confrontational.
Many of these are our European neighbours, who it would be easy to assume aren’t so different to us here in the UK. Take this a step further, with a trip over the pond to another culture we might assume is similar to our own, and you’ll find your American associates won’t be in any hurry to forge personal relationships with their business partners, as earning their trust comes from your accomplishments, skills, and reliability—much more head-based decision making—becoming too emotionally close and mixing business with pleasure is considered unprofessional and even risky. Heading in a different direction, to China, for example, they’re unlikely to trust you enough to forge a business connection until a suitable closeness and friendship has been forged through the gradual sharing of meals, evening drinks and coffee breaks, as well as adjusting your negotiation approach accordingly.
As we’re starting to see, there’s no one-size-fits-all option when it comes to crossing cultures. So, when it comes to business goals and ensuring customer success, we need our target customer personas to accurately reflect the target audience. This is why user research and customer data are essential to identify gaps and pain points specific to our products and marketing materials that deliver the customer experience expected from each continent, country, or culture.
Understanding a new culture’s customer experience
Those few examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Shen goes on to outline other major differences between American websites and those in China, all bound by customer expectations, culture, and the appropriate visual representation for each. American pages tend to be clean and minimal. In contrast, Chinese versions are crammed with information, ads, and banners, similar to newspaper pages, which could soon feel overwhelming to other cultures. As much as we initially believe that the Chinese simply prefer clutter and chaos, it’s got a lot more to do with the limitations of their language and symbol-based text system.
How can we create a customer journey with culturalisation?
Shen talks about understanding the market culturally and in the brand or product’s given industry. Localisation research should be carried out in the local language as well as the various official languages, taking local holidays, religious festivals and celebrations into consideration, especially with e-commerce products. As you’d expect from a UX specialist, research must be conducted with local users to understand the true customer experience from the ground up.
On this point, another global UX and culture expert, Chui Chui Tan, shows us how important designing for a global audience is with her three-step system covering the essentials, the basics, and the details. It’s a fascinating watch covering all kinds of elements from language differences (catering to symbol-based scripts as opposed to Latin lettering systems, where despite having thousands of characters, there might not be a single, suitable word for a direct translation), naming conventions (without such a simple understanding we can overly complicate or render web forms and input fields useless, never mind change someone’s entire identity), visual representation of icons (how crucial our images mean what we mean them to instead of something entirely inappropriate), and so many more essential examples.
Nail the essentials, get the basics right, and focus on the details.
In Tan’s words, by observing and exploring market insights, behavioural insights, and cultural insights, we should “Nail the essentials, get the basics right, and focus on the details.” That way, our brand and product will have a far better chance of standing out in a crowded market and integrating naturally with the local culture.
For how that might look in practice, we can defer to those three different stages using her Three Levels of Culturalisation: ‘respect’ establishment, cultural expectation, and experience enhancement.
1. ‘Respect’ establishment
Like any new relationship with someone from another country or culture, you’d likely try to explore and understand your differences before establishing trust and respect. If there isn’t mutual respect for cultural or religious beliefs, you (or they) may seem disrespectful or rude, and the relationship will likely fail before it even starts.
Research needs to come from the customer’s perspective to create customer journeys that respect a new culture and provide a healthy customer experience. These are the basics you must ‘nail’ to avoid failing to understand your potential customers at their most basic level.
2. Cultural expectation
This second level won’t quite ruin the relationship as the appearance of a lack of respect from our first level could, but it can significantly damage the technical operation of your customer experiences.
Customer satisfaction is essential for loyalty, return sales, and customer retention, so minimising pain points throughout the entire customer journey is vital. If you overlook how their culture impacts the site or app’s operation for the average customer, they’re likely to ditch your operation for one that’s done its due diligence and delivers the customer journey they prefer.
What kinds of elements are these? They include naming conventions, address, numeric and date formatting, currency options, payment methods, social media and network conventions, typography standards, grammar, punctuation and text presentation, translations, language differences, local dialect, slang, common phrases, and their meanings on-site or during customer service interactions.
By creating culturally correct buyer personas and customer journey map templates, we reduce pain points, boost customer retention, and improve the customer’s interaction with your brand and product.
3. Experience enhancement
This third level is where we focus on the details, creating a customer journey that isn’t just functional and appropriate but exceptional based on the data points provided by UX research data and providing seamless customer interactions within all the touchpoints.
However you measure customer experience—through market research, customer interviews, or customer surveys—if you can create an ideal cultural customer persona to predict your localised app or website’s future state to drive optimum customer satisfaction and positive customer experience, then they’ll take your journey maps to a much higher level.
They could relate to your products, how you present them, their relevance or marketing, your tone, site operation, product positioning, financial and subscription models, or utilising what technology is and isn’t readily available in different customer segments.
These small cultural details make a brand more competitive, boosting growth, retention, conversions, and, ultimately, its rate of success. Adding them to your process or customer journey map template could make the difference between a good and great operation.
Summary
Ensuring cross-cultural personas are part of your customer journey mapping tools is crucial for breaking new territories and ensuring a successful transition. Learning and understanding the complex differences requires thorough exploration and local research. As we’ve seen, designing for different cultures isn’t simple or as obvious as it may appear from an initial assessment. Exploring Chui Chui Tan’s three levels of culturalisation can help the UX researcher focus on what’s truly essential, what’s necessary, and where the fine details are that make a cross-cultural site sing.
Building cross-cultural personas and working them into your customer journey mapping examples helps to create the customer journey that won’t just satisfy any nation of new users but builds strength and loyalty in your brand through the understanding and belonging they want to feel.
Our user research experts are available to help you get closer to your customers. If you would like to arrange a no obligation call, get in touch by emailing us at hello@ux247.com or share your requirement using the form below.
