How doxy.me went from one to 100 languages in a few months with Lokalise

Doxy.me is a telemedicine company that offers a simple, free, and secure video conferencing solution to medical providers and their patients around the world. 

Founded in 2014, doxy.me was originally built to reduce hurdles tied to prenatal care by making doctor visits more accessible for expectant mothers. Of particular value to women living in rural areas, the platform eliminated the need for lengthy and time-consuming travel for standard check-ups. 

Steady growth was replaced with swift progress when the pandemic hit. As demand for telemedicine solutions skyrocketed, doxy.me saw a tenfold increase in providers using their platform, going from around 65,000 providers to more than 1,000,000 from over 150 countries. 

We spoke to Jacob Palmer, doxy.me's International Growth Manager, who is leading their localization efforts to ensure both doctors and patients around the world can use the platform with the ease such a solution requires. 

Accessibility and expansion through localization

Patients are as diverse an audience as it gets, and minimizing technical and linguistic barriers is a must to ensure services can be accessed by those who need them.

“One of the biggest challenges we faced early on was entering markets that didn't speak English. For example, in Latin America, Spanish is a necessity and local doctors would repeatedly ask whether the platform is available in Spanish,” Jacob explains. 

It's not just Latin America. With users from more than 150 countries, having an interface that anyone can navigate is by and large a prerequisite for adoption – a realization that kick-started doxy.me's localization efforts. 

From spreadsheets to Lokalise

Like most companies, doxy.me's early localization approach involved spreadsheets, emails, and time-consuming manual management. 

“Before Lokalise, it was a matter of copying texts into documents, sending them away, translating them, receiving them back, and then manually copying them back into the right place by trying to match phrases,” Jacob recalls.

Quickly realizing that this process was neither sustainable nor sufficiently scalable, Jacob set out to find a solution and discovered Lokalise.

“The customizability of Lokalise and its applicability to what we're doing made it a no-brainer. It's ideal for a flexible business model such as ours. The functionalities we discovered later and now use every day were just the cherry on top.”

With Lokalise, Jacob has automated most of the legwork. By integrating everything into Lokalise – from GitLab and their databases, to Intercom and their marketing – the translation workflow has not only become more efficient, but also scalable. 

“I just pick a project, choose the strings I want to translate, select the language, and quickly have them pulled in and translated within a couple of days,” Jacob shares. 

The doxy.me platform has two sides – the patient side and the doctor side. Now, doxy.me is supporting the patient experience in over 100 languages and offers more than 20 languages to doctors, adding new ones dynamically as requests come in. If a large group of providers show interest in having a new language added, Jacob can make it happen in record time thanks to Lokalise. 

“We went from one to one hundred languages in a few months. It could've been even faster, but, all of sudden I had become the bottleneck. I couldn't research what languages we should add fast enough,” Jacob laughs. 

Lokalise Messages – a game changer in customer support

For Jacob, one of the highlights is how Lokalise has helped the doxy.me team take customer support to the next level. Being able to easily translate help articles has made it possible to equip providers with the necessary information to quickly troubleshoot and solve any acute issues they run into.

Better yet, Lokalise Messages lets doxy.me respond to and assist with virtually every real-time support request, no matter the language. Lokalise Messages provides live two-way chat translation for Intercom users. 

“Being able to chat with and provide support to our users in their native language, in real time, at all times is game-changing. Doubly so, given the urgent nature of most requests,” Jacob says. 

A force for good

Doxy.me is a value-driven company that measures its success by how many people it helps. 

“That's why all the core functionalities on our platform are free to use and accessible to anyone with a device and a browser. What drives us is our ‘Why,’ which is telemedicine for all. And, with Lokalise, we're much closer to bringing our vision to life,” Jacob shares. 

Doxy.me's localization efforts have allowed local providers to better deliver the care patients need and the company has received excellent feedback about the quality of the translations. 

Of their one million users, about a quarter are from outside the U.S., and this share is growing rapidly with language no longer a barrier. 

“If we didn't use Lokalise, everything would take longer, cost more, and would be more frustrating.”