As a response to the growing need for specialized online support, Yamagata Europe developed a customized machine translation solution that enables Nikon’s European support team to communicate efficiently with customers in up to 21 languages.
Nikon is a trusted brand for photography professionals and enthusiasts alike. As a brand specializing in highly technical camera products, Nikon wants to offer its customers premium support in case of defects or complex inquiries. When it comes to handling general technical issues, local Nikon companies and distributors already handle a great deal of the support inquiries. But with the shift towards more complex products, more technical knowledge and specialized technicians are needed. This is where Nikon’s centralized, European technical support team comes in.
Multilingual technical support
Located in the Portugal, Nikon’s support agents handle customer inquiries in no less than 21 languages. In the past, when multilingual requests came in, support agents used free and generic online translation solutions to decipher the message. However, these tools were often incapable of interpreting the user-generated content in an accurate way and correctly representing typical Nikon technical terms, causing delays in the support process. On top of this, as the requests often contain confidential information, Nikon was looking for a secure solution to handle their data.
In addition, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020 and less customers were able to meet a physical support responsible, the need for online support increased, along with the need for more accurate and secure automated translations.
Customized machine translation solution
As a long-time Yamagata customer, Nikon reached out to us in the autumn of 2020. Nikon wanted to address the increase in multilingual technical inquiries and find a solution to make it easier for their support agents to handle customer requests efficiently.
Yamagata Europe developed a customized automated translation solution, based on AI-driven neural machine translation combined with a set of rules to improve inaccuracies in the user-generated input, a database of existing human translations and a customized terminology layer. Thanks to an API connection between Yamagata Europe’s solution and Nikon’s Customer Support Portal, customer requests to the European support center in one of the 21 languages can now be automatically translated into English. This enables Nikon technicians to immediately understand questions and comments upon receipt, which helps them to provide faster support. In addition to the direct connection, more than 30 Nikon support agents also have access to a web portal that allows manual text input for translation.
All Nikon data used for customization and each translated message remains the unique property of Nikon and is not accessible to third parties. During the past 6 months, nearly 500,000 words have been processed within this secure environment.
Better translations, better support
Relying on Yamagata Europe results into more accurate and secure translations and enables the Nikon support team to fully focus on the technical side of things. This speeds up the support process and ultimately leads to happier Nikon customers. Want to find out how our automated translation solutions could improve your process?
