So, you’ve got everything in your app, right from a great user-friendly design, navigational ease, to the best UX features ensuring a seamless customer experience!
What else remains? What is that transcends these features to deliver an impeccable customer experience?
The answer is language, have you localize it for your customers?
Language indeed matters. As a bank or a financial institution, you won’t be limiting your outreach, or operation to the highly-educated English-speaking urban consumer.
You will, instead, also be reaching the regional consumers to drive optimal investments, and create a genuinely national outreach to become a household banking brand.
Imagine a modern mobile or website application, but lacking the regional language quotient!
Do you think the application will work within consumers that are looking forward to your products and services, but ultimately turn off your app, and uninstall it just because you aren’t speaking their language?
We’ll tell you, it won’t! Considering India’s present digital growth, and the one in the years to come, mobile/ website applications will have to be localized to keep the regional sales turbines rotating.
But then, apart from sales, what makes the language so critical to regional success in India, and how do you, as a bank, localize your web/mobile app to bring regionally fruitful results?
Here’s a blog answering this question.
Banking Application Localization: An Essential Element for Success in Markets like India
Banking is a consumer-based business, connecting millions of consumers through a particular set of service, products, investment opportunities, and ideologies.
A lot of banks, which were otherwise limiting themselves to the city or the metropolitan markets, are now eyeing the regional tier-2, tier-3 and rural markets to grow their business.
Now that’s happening because technology outreach has opened access to various virtual platforms, educating the conventional consumers about modern-day transaction platforms, and their benefits.
However, opening the doors to technology isn’t merely adequate. Dealing with regional markets refers to several fruitful opportunities.
However, at the same time, the venture isn’t as straight-forward. It poses a lot of geographical, cultural, and technical, challenges, of which language is but one!
Language is an essential element of the regional markets, simply because the consumers aren’t as well-versed, comfortable, as willing to English language content.
There aren’t as many English speakers in India!
According to some reports, a tiny part, around 125 million, which is roughly 10% of the total population, speaks English in India.
A massive chunk, as vast as 90% of the regional audience, although reasonably adept at technology, prefers reading content in its language, and understands things better when explained in it.
The above fact makes it imperative for all types of banks (co-operative, agricultural, nationalized, etc.) to localize their websites, and mobile applications to reach as many regional consumers as possible in an organic way.
Now, earning an investment, or opening a bank account is the eventual result. But, the way to it goes through a lot of other essential elements that matter for banks to operate and succeed in a particular market in the long run. These include the following.
- A well-defined localization strategy to help create gradual trust among the local users.
- An engaging, linguistically, culturally, and technically appropriate language.
- Localizing the website content, including information about its services, products, website menus, terms & conditions, etc.
- Setting up localized Chatbots to enable localized and personalized interactions.
- Developing user-friendly localized apps that speak the user’s native language.
- Delivering automated localized SMSs, and confirmations to ensure the right action.
- Running localized marketing campaigns, and ads to establish a local reputation, and pave the way to local opportunities.
- Localizing the existent mobile app, developing an entirely new app to simplify banking transactions for the local consumers.
6 Localization Benefits for Banks – Language Localization for Regional Customers
If selling a product or a service is easy, sustaining the consumers trust, and generating repeated business is something that poses a challenge in the long run.
Localization helps bridge those linguistic and cultural gaps created by a website, or a mobile app in a foreign language.
For instance, let us consider the example of a farmer from the interiors of Karnataka visiting an agricultural bank website, with a viewpoint of obtaining some agricultural loan.
The moment he sees the website entirely in English, he will deter from exploring the website. In fact, of he isn’t as literate at English he won’t be able to do it.
As a result, the bank loses a potential opportunity. Despite the bank’s reputation elsewhere, and lucrative loan alternatives, the bank has lost a prospect just because the site wasn’t localized in Kannada!
If the situation doesn’t otherwise seem serious, the above example will help realize banking players as to why language while retaining business matters in the modern-age.
However, had the website been localized to serve the farmer’s linguistic needs, the farmer and the bank will have reaped the following benefits.
- Get a localized banking platform that will help him make educated decisions.
- Content in Kannada helps establish a native connection with the farmer.
- Build a reputation good enough to grow business through referrals.
- For the bank, this initiative helps increase regional sales, and continual upgrades, along with consistent localized efforts will help retain it.
- Going a step ahead, and localizing bank statements, circulars, important notices, updates, new services launches, etc. keeps contributing to the local image.
- It will help strengthen the concept of ‘our needs, our bank’ image within the consumers.
How to Localize Your Bank Application and Website with LinguaSol
LinguaSol’s extensive expertise and experience in localization, especially in the banking sector, help bankers leverage the benefit of localized banking. LinguaSol offers localization solutions for over 100 + Indian as well as foreign languages.
So, if you are a bank, or a financial institution, looking forward to expanding in India’s regional markets, LinguaSol’s localization solution is what you need!
Ref. No- LSB11191017
