Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Best International Web Support Sites – 2007. If you are a LISA Sponsor, Corporate or Introductory Member, the book-length report is available as a free PDF download at http://www.lisa.org/awards/download.html. Others may order it at the same URL.

If you want to participate in next year’s Awards Program by submitting your international web support site(s) or serving as a judge, please contact Arle Lommel, Web Awards Program Manager, at arle@lisa.org.

The increasing level of support seen among our winners is clear evidence of the value of globalization and the fact that treating all customers as equals – regardless of language or culture – makes good business sense.

The sites profiled in this book are all winners of LISA’s Best International Web Support Sites Awards, held in partnership with the Association of Support Professionals (ASP). The Awards are designed to recognize organizations that have taken a lead in providing support to international customers and site users.

Winners of the Awards this year are Cathay Pacific Airlines, Cisco Systems, CX Agents (Cathay Pacific Airlines support site for travel agents), Dell, three divisions from Hewlett-Packard (HP’s main support, ITRC and Procurve sites), McAfee, and Sony’s Vaio-Link division. Each of these sites exemplifies excellence in support in its own way and demonstrates that there is more than one way to achieve it. As this year marks the second year LISA has run this program, we are beginning to see some trends in global support:

1. Improved quality and scope

The quality and scope of global service sites has improved in the last year. Some of the sites that were winners in last year’s program would not have made the cut this year, and the range of winning scores this year was much narrower than last year.

These trends point to an increasing maturation of a field that did not exist just a few years ago. Localization quality in particular has improved over the last year. Since LISA and other organizations have recently pointed to the impact of language quality on international users’ perception of products and satisfaction, this trend is an important one.

2. Increased diversity

Last year, all of the winning sites were from traditional IT companies or their training partners. This year saw two winning entries from the travel sector, highlighting the need for quality support outside of the IT sector.

3. Improved integration of support with corporate sites

While it is still common to develop support sites separately from a corporation’s main site, there is an increasing move to treat them as part of the main site and to “mainstream” the localized content by treating it as part of the corporate site rather than as something run by local offices. This integration improves efficiencies and allows organizations to deliver a consistent brand and customer experience around the world.

As you read the essays in this book, you will observe various ways to deliver quality international support while integrating it into the support mainstream. While this year’s winners are ahead of most organizations in terms of the level of support they provide, the excellence they are pioneering will become increasingly common in the coming years.

Do’s and Don’ts of International Web Support

The following lists of items were identified by our judges as good and bad features of sites they evaluated. Carefully considering these items will help site developers make appropriate design and development choices to better support their customers.

The following lists are presented in no particular order of priority.

Make language selection simple and pervasive. Ensure that it is obvious to users who need to switch languages, regardless of which language the site displays at any given time.

Our judges noticed that on some sites you have to know whatever language the site is in to switch to another language. The most user-friendly way to support multilingual users is to have a persistent menu that displays language options in local language names, not in the language the page is currently set to. For example, one judge pointed out that if a support page is set to Japanese, users should not need to know the Japanese characters for “French” in order to switch to French.

The sites evaluated this year handle language selection quite well. Fortunately, processes that require users to log in and out or to access obscure site preferences have largely been replaced with more intuitive methods for language selection. There is, however, still no real de facto standard for how users should be able to switch languages easily within a single page or content piece (e.g., if the user wants to see the original version of a document in order to compare it with the localized version). In many cases, a user is required to change languages and then renavigate to the same content piece in the other language.

Develop consistent site structures that apply across all languages.

Closely related to the previous point, we are seeing an increasing trend towards making sure that all localized support sites share the same site structure. If each localized site has an ad hoc structure created by a local team, it greatly complicates switching languages since the location of a given piece of content will vary by language.

In addition, consistent site structures simplify search and maintenance tasks and allow site developers to more easily assess content coverage and needs.

Make sure that pages address locales and not just languages.

This item was on the list last year and is still a top item. One French reviewer of a site reported that a site for Canada listed prices of items in euros (appropriate for France) and U.S. dollars, but not Canadian dollars.

Similarly, another site listed phone numbers in France for French contact on the Canada site, but provided no local numbers for Quebec. It is easy to confuse languages and locales, so developers need to consider the distinction and make sure they take it into account.

Search needs improvement.

Search remains a difficult area for developers to address. Judges complained that sites frequently returned results in incorrect languages or even linked to results in a different language than what the search result summaries presented. (Last year one of our judges reported searching for a phrase in Spanish, and receiving a search result summary in Danish that led to translated content in Korean!) Similar difficulties continue to plague multilingual search. Search is one area in which winning sites showed almost no improvement over last year, and it remains a significant technical challenge for most developers. At the least, internationalized support should be language-aware and limit results to the appropriate language.

Allow for a personalized support experience.

Web support is increasingly moving towards allowing for personalized support experiences, such as allowing users to create customized support home pages that display content relevant to a particular user. International support has not caught up to this recent trend, so this area was the weakest one for typical winning sites.

Make sure that all required content is localized.

Even for sites with excellent coverage overall in target languages, it was not uncommon for judges to report finding key content that had not been localized, or that had been localized inappropriately. For example, judges found that end-user license agreements (EULAs) were often left in the source language and not translated, or were translated without any awareness of local legal conventions. Since EULAs are binding legal contracts, not localizing them properly can lead to legal problems or to customer dissatisfaction. Judges also reported that install packages for drivers or components were oftentimes not localized, even though their support pages were, a situation that could leave users unable to follow through on support content.

Find consistent ways to solicit user feedback on localized pages.

Most sites do not have a good way of procuring feedback on the quality and relevance of localized content. Without such a mechanism, developers cannot capture information on the problems encountered by users that are particular to a given region or language.

Use Unicode for all content and ensure that the encoding is declared in the head of individual pages.

A surprising number of sites had the occasional area of garbled text, either because not all page components utilized the same encoding (e.g., a portion of a Japanese page might be in Shift-JIS encoding even though the rest of the page was Unicode), or simply because the HTML header did not declare the encoding properly.

Make sure that all features work as expected in all languages.

A number of sites had substantially different scores in the various support languages because features that worked well in one language were either missing or had functional problems in another. In some cases, these problems appeared in features the developers had chosen to highlight for judges, indicating that developers may not be aware of problems that occur in languages they do not personally know.

Provide adequate context to translators during site development.

The increasingly common use of content management systems, many of which support multilingual content as an “add-on,” means that localizers may not be able to view the full context of the text they are working with. Without this context, they may not be able to make appropriate decisions about wording or grammar, problems that are often not apparent or do not exist in the source language text.

These tips are just some of the factors to consider when designing and implementing international support sites. While there is no single recipe for success, developers should consider these basic issues in formulating their support tactics and strategies.