Proposal for a simple multilingual content creation workflow

Background

We do Customer Service for our online and physical store customers in 4 countries - Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. We want to take advantage of self-service options using Help Center and Web Widget.

Our focus is on quality, ease of use and a short route to publication. Multilingual content creation can be a painfully slow process, so we hope to optimize a workflow that can drive our self-serve strategy for years to come.

Teams

Agents dealing with end users directly in their local language on multiple channels (among them chat, email and Facebook) will be the primary contributors of new content. Drawing on their immediate relation to end users and their experience they will actively be scanning for potential deflection opportunities.

Quality assurance team verifying content is relevant, formatted correctly, contributing localized content and ready for publication. There is a team member responsible for each language / country.

Article template

For the moment we have only one article type, a Q & A format designed to deliver brief to the point resolutions for common questions.

We have a template with the content structure in place and translated for all languages, we use English as the source language since it is understood by agents for all languages. 

We use H1 headers for the Question and Answer parts for them to stand out clearly in the web widget (the size formatting in HC will not have the same effect). Other settings of the template are:

• State: draft
• Open for comments: deselected
• Promote article: deselected
• Labels:
  • needs_review_da,
  • needs_review_se,
  • needs_review_no, 
  • needs_review_fi
  • and KCTemplate.

Help Center Lists

A List for each language is created, it is simply a filtered search that looks for any content containing the local need_review label.

Hat tip to Joel Hellman for thinking up this Label + List scenario.

Workflow

Agent:

• An agent uses creates a new article from the knowledge template
  • Writes the English and their localized version of the article
  • Select a specific "Draft article" section and saves article.

Quality assurance team:

• Routinely (maybe weekly/monthly) check for newly submitted content by visiting their List*.
• Review, and possibly modify, the English content and contribute their own localized version.
• Remove their language needs_review label and saves article.
• If their label is the last to be removed, i.e. all localized content is in place and verified, they will publish the article to its proper section.

Thoughts

We have not put this setup to the test in reality just yet, so I'm very interested in any thoughts on improvements you might have.

Other workflows for ensuring our content is reviewed and kept up to date will also need to be put in place.