How RWS is rolling out programs faster than any LSP by partnering with Lokalise

RWS is the world's leading language service provider, with over 60 years of experience, 80 offices worldwide, and over 7,600 employees. They work with 90 of the world's top 100 brands to help with highly complex, large-scale localization needs. 

These services are provided by a combination of in-house and external linguistic specialists, as well as industry-leading technology making the process faster and more agile, and resulting in high-quality output. 

As a company that values productivity and efficiency, RWS was quick to realize the benefit of combining their technologies and skills with Lokalise to better serve their end customers. 

Lokalise, by providing the onboarding platform and CMS, and RWS by providing the content expertise, together have discovered a partnership that benefits one another, as well as all customers involved. We spoke to Business Development Manager, Joseph Holtman, about the partnership.

A partnership that opens the door to working with unicorns

RWS and Lokalise came together organically, winning language service deals where Lokalise was the chosen technology partner, and RWS was responsible for the content side. It wasn't long before the two companies realized that they complement each other’s services perfectly.

Joseph emphasizes that Lokalise's origin story – originally being developed as an internal tool to ease the localization process for the technical team – was a major selling point in communicating the benefit of the tool to potential customers, who are often tech-savvy product developers.

“We realized that Lokalise's origin story was something developer teams could really relate to. It really helped us connect with software-based teams – these unicorns in the Bay Area.”

That was in early 2020. Since then, RWS has developed an internal position to manage the Lokalise partnership, and they have since worked on at least 12 joint ventures and established a formal partnership.

The two companies put together their resources and recommend each other for future business opportunities. 

“This is a true lead-generating partnership. And I'm not just paying lip service. Lokalise really go out of their way to find opportunities to get us involved.”

Customer retention and deepening collaboration

The first step in most of RWS' projects is onboarding – the process of setting up the customer with the different systems, collecting their content to be localized, etc. What’s usually a long and imperfect process with its own challenges is made more agile thanks to the collaboration with Lokalise.

“Because our teams have become so familiar with each other, we'll be able to roll out programs faster than any other language service provider.” 

This eased onboarding process leads to an overall simplified customer experience. This has resulted not only in strengthening customer retention but has also paved the way for expanding their services to additional divisions within the client organization. The improved processes are good for everyone – the end user reduces strain on their resources, RWS expands the scope of the collaboration, and Lokalise accesses new customers.

The power of joint stories

Holtman says that what he's most proud of is how the teams have learned to work together to better tell their joint story, and support their customers in turn.

“Our RWS solution architects and program management teams have become experts on how to leverage Lokalise. That really helps us tell our story.”

Holtman also emphasizes that the strong connection and the direct line to the Lokalise developer team significantly eases any concerns about adopting new software and platforms on the customer side. They're left with a seamless process to scale and simplify their localization efforts.

“When it comes to change, it's what people are afraid of. But when working with two organizations that know each other very well, it can take away a lot of those fears.” 

Since RWS' merger with SDL in 2020, RWS has owned their own technology stack. Holtman shares that some might think they wouldn't look to collaborate externally, but that this couldn't be farther from the truth. Not only are they dedicated to providing the best possible experience for the customers, but they see value in continued collaboration:

“Our leadership teams from the top down have been really excited about the Lokalise partnership as a collaborative system, and are putting more people behind it.”