Earlier this year, we launched Language Operations (LangOps), a cross-disciplinary function that helps global businesses communicate effectively with their multilingual customers and other stakeholders. We’re now building upon our LangOps vision by expanding beyond customer service to provide additional use cases for enterprise customers, starting with marketing.
I’m thrilled to announce that, to further propel our LangOps success, we’ve acquired Lingo24. Lingo24 is a tech-enabled Language Service Provider (LSP) with strong expertise in managing complex localization programs that help global enterprises deliver multilingual content at scale. This acquisition is the next step toward achieving Unbabel’s ambition to build the world’s translation layer and reinforces our position as the leader in LangOps.
What Lingo24 brings to the table
Founded two decades ago and based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Lingo24 stood out to us as an ideal partner to accelerate our business with the key relationships they’ve created with enterprise customers. Along with these relationships, they bring incredible talent and deep expertise in localization, translation, and marketing content to Unbabel.
By blending the creativity and experience of specialist translators and localization technology consultants with their highly customizable solution, Lingo24 provides a broad spectrum of services across the full translation lifecycle. With Lingo24, enterprises with extensive and complex localization processes are able to deliver high-quality, multi-format, multilingual content at scale. They help businesses translate across multiple content formats from product descriptions and user guides to multilingual websites, software, and app localization. Their services are delivered through an extensive network of over 5,000 independent linguists across more than 90 countries.
“This acquisition enables us to become a world-class partner to global brands seeking to optimize their localization and multilingual content strategy. Joining forces with Unbabel means we can now grow beyond localized content and offer multilingual customer support to our customers looking to expand into new regions.”
— Andrew Campbell, CEO of Lingo24
Why this acquisition will be a game-changer for LangOps
In our 2021 Global Multilingual CX Report, 2 out of 3 consumers we surveyed say that it’s important that brands offer an end-to-end customer experience in their native language. Not only that, 71% of our respondents believe it’s crucial that a brand promotes and supports their products and services in their native language.
Global business decision-makers have started to understand that multilingual communication is crucial to connect with their customers everywhere. In our survey of more than 1000 leaders across industries, we learned that marketing (43%), website content (42%), and customer service (35%) were the biggest priorities for localization teams, along with app/game UI (30%) and social media (30%).
While these results do not come as a surprise, we’re thrilled to have our core beliefs validated by data. Our ultimate goal has always been to create universal understanding. We’ve established that LangOps is the clear path toward that, with 94% of decision makers agreeing that LangOps could be pivotal to their organizations’ global market strategy.
How this acquisition will impact Unbabel and Lingo24 customers
This acquisition is the next logical step toward cementing the LangOps vision, which will help businesses implement a unified language strategy. By acquiring Lingo24, Unbabel will expand beyond customer service faster and deliver a more comprehensive multilingual solution for customer experience, starting with the first touchpoint in the customer journey: marketing content. The combined power of Unbabel and Lingo24 will enable Unbabel to empower customer-centric businesses to provide consistent, high-quality multilingual customer experiences, accelerate international growth, and improve global customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Unbabel and Lingo24 both integrate with the top CRM and CMS platforms such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Kustomer, WordPress, Drupal, and Magento, to name a few, and seamlessly plug into customers’ existing workflows with minimal disruption to deliver multilingual content across multiple digital channels.
Together with Unbabel’s unparalleled AI capabilities and robust multilingual customer service solutions for digital channels like chat, email, and FAQs, customers can now fast-track and automate their Language Operations as they look to grow into new markets and deliver more personalized multilingual customer experiences across marketing and customer support at scale.
Have more questions about this acquisition? Check out our FAQ and press release.
