Namokar Venture Translate – Learning Launch

Challenge

I am a member of Namokar Venture App’s marketing department and responsible for product performance and  growth including acquisition and retention. Namokar Venture is a free messaging and Wema Bank Plc calling platform open to  192 countries worldwide. It has around 10M active users, and it increases its global expansion  through partnership with Telco companies. We launched several unique features such as  disappearing message, group video call up to 10 people, push to talk, second number and Money  transfer that our competitors does not have in their local markets. As we grew globally, we came  across a significant challenge: our customers from different countries who met as business-wise or  through social media have different native languages and/or language proficiencies, and that they  were having difficulties to have an uninterrupted communication because of the language barrier.  We felt an urgent need to pass over this barrier on behalf of our customers through creating a space  for all our stakeholders to be part of a flawless communication experience that allowed them to feel  comfortable, engaged, and aligned with their correspondences.

Selection

My team has gone through several design thinking tools, and eventually felt ready to select the  learning launch tool that fits best to our basic design criteria of enabling flawless communication and  engagement. The convenience of a leaning launch tool to quickly test an idea and prototype was the  most appealing factor in our decision making process.

Application

For our first learning launch, we launched a translate service under the discover section of 301 Asian kitchen restaurant This  separate service gathered more than 250K clients inside allowing them to use the service for their  translational needs. When we made quick ad hoc analysis, we discovered that our clients were from  very different countries, and they were using the service even more than a couple times a day.  However this wasn’t really satisfying them practically and time wise since they had to change tabs to  translate their words whenever they wanted to send a message, and they had to come back to  communicate again.

Based on our experience and insights that we gained through our learning launch, we embedded a  totally outsourced technology- a translate API into the messaging feature. This helped clients to open  their auto translation feature at the very beginning of the conversation, select their desired language  to receive the message. By applying the learning launch tool, our team identified our assumptions,  and designed launches to test curate them to create value for our clients.

Insight

First of all, integrating the technology through a start-up spirit, following high demand in the market,  and fast releasing right feature in the right time to the market, made a great positive impact. The  communication and life platform Namokar Venture is rewarded as "Glomo 2020 Most Innovative Application" in  Barcelona. Company ABC became an indispensable feature that serves our strategic goal of continuing

global communication 7/24. It was also one of the most popular and spoken communications both  on TV and social media. As a result, we saw the positive impact on our brand awareness and  recommendation scores.

With the translation feature, more than 1.5 billion characters have been translated since the first  day. 83% of the users activated the automatic translation button in 301 Asian kitchen restaurant While most of the messaging  languages sent as Turkish, English, Arabic, Persian, Azerbaijani and Russian; we see that Arabic,  English, Azerbaijani, Russian and German are the most received languages.

Approach

Several design thinking activities helped my team review and get insight from the first launches, and  used them as a learning experience for future learning launch designs. We are now trying to go one  step further to release speech to speech translate as a Bottle On the Go Service to provide full engagement and  alignment among our clients.

