Digital Innovation In Retail: How Do You Innovate And Improve Your Retail Organization With Technology?

Digital innovation does not have to mean digital disruption. Innovation in retail has long been the dividing line between those brands that become household names (take Amazon, for example), and those that slip past into memory – innovations in the services and quality you offer, innovations in the messaging, innovations in the product itself.

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At it’s best, innovation integrates with what already makes you ‘you’. What is it that makes you and your brand different from the competition – and how can you apply new models and new technologies to accentuate that? 2020 has seen a huge paradigm shift in retail as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the necessity of mass lockdowns. But the shift to online shopping as the norm rather than an extra was already well underway. eCommerce already accounted for 16% of all retail in the US in 2019, a number that’s sure to jump this year.

That paradigm shift, despite its shocks and disruptions, also represents an opportunity to light the way forward. One of the central questions in retail is how best to answer the customer’s needs and wants – and in an online world, these customers come from all over the globe.

To converse with the whole globe however, your retail content – whether that’s product descriptions, prices, ad copy, or blog content – needs to be translated to the local audience. That’s where AI machine-based translation comes in. Manually translating new items in an eCommerce store would be a painstaking and never-ending task. But AI-based translation softwares – with the capacity to learn from past mistakes and improve for the future – are becoming a reality, thanks in part to Jonckers’ WordsOnline system.

Take, for example, our two case studies here – one with Adobe and the other with MediaPro. In both cases, each company needed large amounts of material translated quickly – with new content regularly coming in – that could then be swiftly translated to the languages of its users. And with both being worldwide names, that’s a lot of languages!

But through the use of WordsOnline, these problems were resolved. For Adobe’s Experience League, a vast library of learning resources for Adobe products, the question was how to effectively build large segments of automated, time-coded transcriptions for the videos – which would then translate into subtitles and automated voice-overs in the relevant language for the user. What would have once been a near-impossible undertaking is now a regular process, with some 15 videos localized a week, each one between 50 to 80 minutes long. That’s approximately 15 hours of new content each week.

In the case of MediaPro, whose e-learning arm helps its users and clients maintain excellent cybersecurity standards, the need for effective translation requires specificity and exactness. One of the key features of WordsOnline is that it ‘saves’ previous translations – so the system does not need to create new translations of phrases that have already been used. As a result, the client has to pay for fewer translations, saving them money. A translator always checks in afterwards to ensure the final translation has a human touch.

Two excellent case studies of how innovation has helped these companies move forward into the future. Want to find out more? Click here