Imagine you lead the German division of a US multinational corporation. Now, suppose your boss, sitting thousands of miles away in the US, pushes your local team to rush customer issue resolutions, with performance measured in “tickets closed per day”.
This could backfire as German customers prefer service reps to fully understand and resolve their concerns. This means your reps service fewer customers per day, leading to a “steep drop” in performance and poor employee experience (EX). Conversely, the American way would leave many locals with a bad customer experience (CX).
That’s where globalization fails, bluntly prioritizing efficiency and uniformity over cultural sensitivity and individual relevance.
The numbers are out:
- In 2024, employee engagement in the US hit its lowest point (31%) in a decade. (Gallup)
- Low employee engagement could cost the world US$ $8.9 trillion. (Gallup 2024 Report)
- Worldwide, 32% of consumers would leave a brand they love after only one bad experience. (PwC)
- Failing to meet evolving CX demands could cost companies US$ $3.8 trillion globally in 2025. (CX Network)
- 75% of customers switch brands if interactions aren’t in their language, whereas localization can boost revenue nearly 6x. (CSA Research)
These figures unanimously show that a generic, one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t work in 2025. Fortunately, there is a better alternative: glocalization.
What is glocalization and how does it improve EX and CX?
Investopedia defines glocalization as “a product or service that is developed and distributed globally but also adjusted to accommodate consumers in a local market.” A portmanteau of globalization and localization, it entails adapting global products and services to suit local cultures and tastes.
Examples of glocalization include a SaaS company offering software UI and customer support in multiple languages and different communication styles, or a global clothing brand adjusting its products’ sizing and colors to reflect culture and preferences of different regions.
By glocalizing strategies and operations at the regional level, you can successfully expand your business globally by gaining access to a broader, more culturally diverse audience. It helps you attract natives with localized products, customer service, marketing, pricing, recruitment drives, and pretty much everything else.
While it usually means localizing offerings and customer service, many businesses do not realize that Glocalizing employee engagement—empowering regional teams to provide culturally relevant products, services, and support—can also enhance EX, a key driver of CX.
This blog explores the deep interconnection between EX and CX, how Glocalizing employee engagement leads to more satisfied customers, and practical steps to implement it to enhance EX and CX.
The global-local paradox: Bridging the gap between global strategy and local needs
The global customer illusion: Why one-size-fits-all fails in CX
Historically, globalization has enabled businesses to scale rapidly into new markets, reduce costs, streamline operations, and maintain brand consistency across markets.
However, as increasingly more customers demand personalization with diverse cultural norms, purchasing behaviors, and communication styles, standardized global strategies have fallen flat and alienated entire markets.
The attempt to expand your business globally in other nations can fall flat due to several reasons:
- Not taking an interest in understanding local culture
- Not conducting adequate market research (think surveys and data analytics)
- Not adapting to the cultural nuances and laws of the target region
- Using standardized content and machine translations in marketing campaigns
For instance, this has taken a toll on several companies:
- Example 1: Tesco, a UK supermarket company, entered the US in 2007 but failed to resonate with American shopping culture and closed its operations in 2013, losing nearly $2 billion.
- Example 2: McDonald’s, the US fast-food giant, initially faced several cultural challenges when it entered India due to its globalized, non-vegetarian menu and ignorance of regional dietary preferences.
Consequently, the need to balance global efficiency and consistency with local adaptation is greater than ever.
The disconnect between EX and CX
Unfortunately, there seems to be a myth that glocalization can only be applied to offerings, overlooking the fact that localizing employee engagement can improve EX, which, in turn, truly drives a hyper-personalized CX.
While 80% of 23,000 consumers in a BCG global survey expect personalized experiences, 67% find them incorrect and unpleasant.
It’s because employees lack adequate training in cultural variations and are hindered by rigid, standardized systems that ignore personalization. They even lack sufficient data-driven insights and tools to help them effectively localize interactions.
For example, what if a multinational bank’s data analytics tools only provided generic insights? This would force managers to give standardized financial advice irrelevant to the residents’ needs, resulting in disgruntled employees and poor EX.
You don’t need a Ph.D. to understand that dissatisfied employees lead to disengaged customers. The consequences could be fatal: minimal conversions, reduced trust and loyalty, increased employee/customer churn, negative brand perception, and ultimately a failed attempt to expand the business with a huge financial loss.
On the other hand, glocalization allows local teams to build strong micro-cultures and gain insights from localized surveys and data analytics. This enables businesses to develop an employee base that is better equipped to deliver the personalized experiences today’s customers crave.
As J. W. Marriott says, “If you take care of your people, your people will take care of your customers and your business will take care of itself.”
Glocalizing employee engagement with microcultures, enhancing CX
One of the best ways to glocalize employee engagement is to create or facilitate Microcultures among your teams located in other regions or countries.
Indeed, some leaders doubt microcultures’ effectiveness as they create silos, foster exclusivity, lead to inconsistencies, and utilize greater resources. However, specialized local teams within a multinational enterprise are known to improve engagement, collaboration, creativity, and innovation.
According to Deloitte research, 71% of employees believe that micro-level culture is most effective, but only 46% of board members share this view. The study acknowledges this disconnect and states that “taking a ‘micro’ approach to culture can enable companies to better understand and shape the work environment for positive outcomes for everyone.” (Paraphrased)
Simply put, instead of a single, company-wide culture, businesses should promote localized work cultures to fit regional markets, as long as they align with the organization’s core values.
Here’s how fostering micro-cultures can allow you to empower local teams to glocalize EX and CX:
- Cultivating microcultures: Developing an environment where microcultures can flourish requires coordination among C-suite executives, HR, department heads, team leaders, and employees. You can create microcultures based on glocalization factors, such as shared values and customs within the regional teams, and appoint local managers and team leaders whom the team member’s trust.
- Leveraging data: This also involves using localized employee and market surveys and listening to various social media channels to understand what’s going on within the region where your business is located. Using advanced AI-powered analytics tools to evaluate this data can provide valuable insights into local trends, cultural nuances, and residents’ buying patterns. The right local insights allow you to deliver the right employee and customer experiences.
- Adapting strategies: This provides local managers with data-backed insights to make autonomous decisions, adapting employee engagement and customer interactions to regional markets. This not only improves local teams’ performance but also enables your enterprise to attract and retain local talent, thrive in new markets with a better customer experience (CX), and become future-proof.
Josh Bersin, global industry analyst, articulates it precisely: “Most of the best ideas on how to serve customers, how to be more productive, how to improve product quality, happen where the work is taking place—not in some corporate headquarters.”
Case in action
A practical instance of this is Royal DSM, a Dutch healthcare company that employed a pilot to implement a “flotilla-style” culture, involving 2,600 employees in four countries. While the organization provides a general direction to steer the “flotilla”, every ship’s crew members (local teams) are free to decide what happens on the “ship”. That’s to say, central management provides core strategies, but employees can work in autonomous microcultures where they can be “in their own skin”, tending to local customers the way they prefer.
Impact on CX
Glocalizing your regional teams not only positively affects employee engagement metrics, such as eSAT, but also has a lasting impact on customer satisfaction metrics, like CSAT and NPS. Allowing employees to absorb regional values and ways of doing business empowers them to take ownership of their work and make effective decisions to improve interactions with local communities.
This also gives your teams the freedom to implement glocalization tactics, such as offering exclusive products, executing culturally inclined marketing campaigns, and providing personalized support to address customers’ specific needs and preferences. Essentially, it enables them to deliver authentic, empathetic, and hyper-personalized CX, making customers feel valued and appreciated.
The outcomes:
- Reduced risks of cultural inappropriateness
- Increased conversions, recurring sales, and positive word-of-mouth publicity
- Improved CX and customer loyalty, leading to higher lifetime value (LTV)
- Enhanced brand credibility and market presence
- Minimized customer service costs (due to fewer complaints)
Let’s revisit the McDonald’s example. After the initial fiasco in India, they applied glocalization strategies to recover from the damage. This involved offering vegetarian options in its menu for the vast vegetarian population, running localized advertising campaigns, and sourcing raw materials from local suppliers. The fast-food giant is now thriving in the nation with 665 total outlets at the end of 2024, and aims to nearly double that within the next two years.
How data-driven insights fuel glocalization efforts and improve EX/CX
Sadly, many CX professionals believe customer surveys are enough to gauge their satisfaction. However, customers often fail to identify the actual issue that caused them a poor experience, abandoning the brand altogether and making CX leaders scratch their heads.
Complementing customer surveys with those of employees, on the other hand, can bridge this gap by providing contextual understanding of how customers see their brand encounters. This helps precisely locate where the issue lies and facilitates both EX and CX improvement.
That’s why it’s crucial to conduct careful CX/EX surveys and leverage advanced analytics to understand both the local team’s sentiment and the preferences of regional consumers.
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
– W. Edwards Deming, Statistician & Management Guru
Let’s see how you can use surveys and analytics technologies to enable data-driven glocalization:
- Targeted employee surveys: Create multilingual surveys with localized attributes, distribute them with location-tagging, get real-time feedback, and segment responses based on regional demographics. It will help you gain valuable insights into regional preferences, communication styles, expectations, pain points, and unmet needs.
- Leveraging sentiment analysis of local feedback: Use advanced ML algorithms to analyze sentiment of the open-ended feedback from local employee and customer surveys, as well as regional social media interactions and internal communication. This will enable you to understand nuanced cultural preferences, values, and emerging trends, allowing you to implement glocalized strategies that improve EX and CX.
- Using predictive analytics to anticipate local needs: Leverage AI-driven predictive analytics that analyze regional historical data and trends to predict demands for specific products, pricing conventions, and marketing possibilities before entering new territories. Stay one step ahead of consumer preferences and concerns by forecasting how they will react to your range of products and services, even before you launch them.
Expand your business internationally with Sogolytics
To grow your business, you must expand to different geographical regions, often far from home. Whether recruiting a remote team or selling products across borders, your standard business practices might fail to hit the target due to significant cultural differences and evolving customer demands.
That’s why glocalizing your employee engagement efforts for overseas operations is essential. Understanding local customs is key to acquiring, retaining, and effectively managing regional talent.
Without an effective glocalization strategy, your company may suffer the same fate as organizations that failed in their attempt to grow internationally.
“You can’t give what you don’t have,” disengaged employees can’t deliver positive, personalized EX.
To successfully glocalize employee engagement, you must thoroughly conduct due diligence on target markets, pulse local employee sentiment, and assess consumer needs.
Start your glocalization journey with Sogolytics. Request a demo to discover how localized surveys and advanced data analytics can drive business growth.
FAQs
Q1: What is glocalization and how does it relate to employee engagement?
A. Glocalization means adapting global products, services, and employee engagement strategies to suit local cultures and preferences. This helps empower regional teams to deliver culturally relevant support, improving both employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX).
Q2: Why does a one-size-fits-all approach fail in customer experience?
A. Standardized global strategies often overlook cultural nuances and local preferences, leading to alienated markets and poor customer satisfaction. Customers demand personalized experiences that respect their local culture, language, and values.
Q3: How can microcultures enhance employee engagement and customer experience?
A. Microcultures are localized work cultures within regional teams that align with core company values but allow autonomy. They improve collaboration, innovation, and cultural relevance, enabling employees to deliver personalized, empathetic CX.
Q4: What role do data-driven insights play in glocalization efforts?
A. Data from localized employee and customer surveys, combined with AI-powered sentiment and predictive analytics, provides valuable insights into regional trends and preferences. This enables local teams to make informed decisions and adapt engagement and CX strategies effectively.
Q5: How can businesses expand internationally using glocalization strategies?
A. Businesses must conduct market research, pulse local employee sentiment, and understand consumer needs. By empowering local teams and customizing offerings, businesses can avoid cultural missteps and thrive in new markets, as exemplified by McDonald’s successful adaptation in India.
