Powering Global Digital Transformation with Language

A total shift to online sales requires a bold digital transformation strategy. Volvo Cars has pledged to shift to 100% digital online sales and electric vehicles by 2030. To achieve this goal, they partnered with Avanade and Lionbridge to revamp their online presence and shift their website from a marketing tool to an online marketplace. Avanade and Lionbridge’s translation and organization strategies powered the transformation for 60 digital stores. Watch the recent webinar to learn how the organizations worked together to create a more seamless and cohesive online presence while still catering to local audiences.

Read our key takeaways from the conversation below.

The Challenge

As Volvo Cars pivots from in-person interactions to online sales, they needed to create an exceptional user experience that resonated around the world.

“We no longer wanted to be a site with just marketing content,” said Cecilia Ernby, Production Lead for Global Online Digital at Volvo Cars. “We wanted to become the flagship store.”

The user experience and brand story for the Volvo Cars website were fragmented across homepages in different countries. Volvo Cars has around 100 websites in 45 languages around the world, with 200 million visitors annually. A central team created the web pages, and in-market teams then translated the site into the necessary languages. Each market having control over their own web pages resulted in different sales strategies, and different website setups, in each market.

To tell one brand story with one voice, Volvo Cars needed to centralize its website and create a cohesive presence across markets and languages.

“As we move to online sales, we need to own the message again,” said Ernby. “We wanted to move away from this scattered look and feel, and we wanted to build one brand and one platform.”

The Solution

A cohesive platform required a new way of translating content and updating websites in each language. Avanade, an innovative digital services provider, worked with Volvo Cars to rethink their strategy on worldwide content creation and translation.

The old approach to translation was fragmented, and relied on each market to complete their own translations with disparate agencies in a timely manner. There was little central oversight of the translation process, and headquarters had no direct contact with the translation agencies used by each market.

“We were keeping our fingers crossed that markets and their translation agencies were done when they needed to be,” Marcus Ivarsson, Manager and Sitecore Strategy MVP at Avanade.

Volvo Cars and Avanade reworked the process to make translation a centralized responsibility. In making this shift, they also centralized all work with Lionbridge, who now completes translations for all languages for Volvo Cars.

To optimize the translation process, Volvo Cars started to use the Smartling Translation Management System to support their centralized translation process. By using Smartling, Volvo Cars was able to cut down on time devoted to managing translation tasks by around 1000 hours. They were also able to use existing translation memories from the local translation agencies, which were previously unique to each market. Fifty seven percent of jobs conducted through Smartling were able to use this shared translation memory, resulting in cost savings. Volvo Cars and Avanade also implemented a Smartling connector for Sitecore to simplify the translation process.

Volvo Cars also put a renewed focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They reworked their translation workflow, and implemented a step where they looked at the translated content and ensured that the content was optimized for search in a local context.

Volvo Cars and Lionbridge work together to decide how best to transcreate or localize content for each market, based on this SEO research. Volvo Cars and Lionbridge also agree on what tone should be set in content, and can standardize these decisions across markets, creating a cohesive brand voice in different languages.

Volvo Cars and Avanade also upgraded the Sitecore Content Management System (CMS) environment to make coordination of the pages a central responsibility. They set up a central publishing team that handles all updates website pages in all markets. They receive feedback from markets on how to best place new products in a local context.

“Once the markets were able to see the new site, we were able to overcome any initial hesitations,” Ivarsson said.

They are now starting to allow local editing and publishing for certain types of content, using color coding to make it clear which types of content local market teams can edit. They also created content guidelines to guide these local edits. By allowing limiting publishing at the local level, they can ensure that the Volvo Cars website stays cohesive across markets while not creating a bottleneck at the corporate level.

The Results

The Volvo Cars website now looks uniform across markets—customers viewing product pages in the United Kingdom, Germany or Belgium now have the same user experience. Volvo Cars has since used the website as a platform to launch many campaigns and products across markets, including an innovative sustainability campaign.

“So many campaigns launched at the same time, which would not have been possible with our previous setup,” Ernby said.

By working with experienced digital transformation providers like Avanade and Lionbridge, Volvo Cars was able to remake their website into an online store for 21^st century digital customers.

Want to learn more?

Contact Lionbridge today to learn about our content transformation services. And watch the full webinar here.