Selling to global audiences is HARD. The first hurdle that comes to mind is the cultural differences: different cultures respond to different things. Some things have different meanings: pleasant in some cultures, downright offensive in others.
Marketing and positioning aside, the operational challenges are significant as well. You need to ship things across oceans and continents, talk to customers in several (hundred) languages, account for different climates, and more.
This barely scratches the surface of what it takes to sell to a global audience. However, I don’t want to dwell on this too much — if you have ever considered international expansion, I’m sure you’ve thought about all these things and more.
Today, I want to show you how one of our clients found simple solutions to complex challenges.
SodaStream sells seltzer machines. Side note: they’re a game-changer during hot summers. I’ve been using one for two years, and I can’t imagine going through a torrid summer without it now.
They were originally founded in 1903 in England, then relaunched later on with an emphasis on healthy drinks. Today, their business is so successful it gets mentioned in outlets like The Wall Street Journal.
Just to give you a better sense of how vast their operations are:
How on earth do you manage all that without an army of employees?
Simple (not easy): you automate as much as possible.
SodaStream has been using the Zendesk for NetSuite integration for years. The critical outcome they were looking for was the ability to deploy standard business processes across all their subsidiaries — if you want to offer your buyers consistent quality, this is a must-have.
Other ways they use this integration to fuel their global operations:
All of these help them deliver excellent experiences to their buyers without mammoth-sized departments.
Remember how I mentioned cultural differences in the beginning? Here’s an obvious challenge of global operations that typically has an expensive solution: translating different languages, especially those that use different alphabets.
For instance, SodaStream manufactures its products in Israel and sells them in Japan, among other places. This means that they need to export tickets written in Japanese characters.
In most cases, such exports are doomed to fail. You need a seamless integration solution to avoid botching foreign characters.
SodaStream found it — yes, we’re bragging because it’s our Zendesk for NetSuite integration.
You can read the full SodaStream story here.
Perhaps you’re thinking that Zendesk is enough to offer a state-of-the-art customer support experience in as many countries as you want. Not really, though.
First off, migrating all the tickets to NetSuite ensures that you keep better tabs and enhance accountability. But there’s something more important at play.
You see, with so many customers across regions, SodaStream has a ton of data they can use to get customer insights. A ton!
If that data is siloed across regions and apps, it becomes almost irrelevant.
When you bring it all together, though, you can spot patterns more easily. You can see, for instance, if there’s a sudden uptick in customers who complain about your most recent soda-making machine.
This may mean you have a manufacturing problem — something you want to get ahead of as soon as possible before you have to deal with millions of returns and complaints.
Here’s another interesting use case: by having all this data in a single dashboard, you can mine for similar wording. Figure out the exact words your customers use to describe your products, and you’ve got the best way to market them!
You’ll be surprised to learn that a solution used by a global company is so affordable. Try the Zendesk for NetSuite integration yourself for free — you stand to lose nothing and could gain at least as much as SodaStream does!
