Mirka's Digital Transformation: Enhancing Customer and Employee Experience (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I'm Mattias Åsvik, IT Program Manager for Mirka CX Initiatives. We're an 80-year-old industry leader delivering solutions for surface finishing, trusted by customers ranging from single carpenters to large automotive manufacturers. Companies that share our vision of continuously improving, always doing better. Mirka is driven by innovation with a clear focus on sustainability. For instance, our dust-free solutions manifest our human-centered mindset, where we improve the well-being of individuals as well as the outcome of their work. We need to get closer to the end customer. There are a lot more channels where people are interacting with our products and our content. And of course, speed, responsiveness. People expect companies to deliver faster, to be more accessible. As a global company, we need to serve our customers in their preferred languages and in their preferred channels. This drives us to make sure we use our time where it matters most. Social media is important to us, not only to build brand awareness, but also to learn from our end customers. Previously, translations were handled locally in many different ways. This led to manual workflows where our employees had to recreate content. Primarily, the problem was the workload for our subsidiaries. Sometimes the translations were done in-house, sometimes outsourced, but the workflow was always manual. It's difficult to be serious about customer experience if you don't care about employee experience. Time spent in manual workflows means time away from doing what we want to do, be creative and continuously improve. Global marketing produced content in English and it was up to the subsidiaries to translate this to their languages. Digitalization and automation. To think outside the box, the box needs to be defined right. Lionbridge and Optimizely gives us a structure to work efficiently localizing content. Our content creators can spend more time optimizing existing content. Speed up the localization process, reducing time to market with new services and products. We also want to ensure the right tone of voice globally and provide a consistent Mirka experience. Ultimately, it's about making us more resilient. In a digital world, we need to be able to react to changes in customer behavior and global trends. In our digitalization journey, we need partners that share our commitment to always do better. With Lionbridge, we have a partner that grows with us and understands our tone of voice, how we want to communicate with our customers. We've been an Optimizely customer for years. Optimizely provides a flexible platform for content management. And with the Lionbridge connector, we're able to offer our employees a workflow that just makes sense. There's no magic involved, but the effect it has on the time spent localizing pages is magical. Lionbridge really wanted to understand our needs. The Optimizely connector was one solution, but we also had different apps that needed translation. We worked on this together to find a solution that scales. Moving to a completely new way of handling translations is of course daunting. We need to show the value from day one, listen to feedback from the users, and show a service that is constantly improving. By introducing Mirka-specific glossaries, we were able to react on the feedback and improve the quality of the translations. Employees without previous knowledge of Optimizely can import and publish content with ease using the Lionbridge connector. This allows us to create complex content without having to train everyone how that content is created in Optimizely. Lionbridge is closely following what is being sent in by us and is dedicated to sparring with us to further improve the service. Self-service is increasingly important as we get closer to our end users. We need to be able to speak the end user's language and provide them with more content, regardless of whether it's a video, a webpage, or product information.