Global Blue + Magnolia
Delivering scalability for Global Blue with DX Cloud
About the customer
Global Blue pioneered the concept of Tax Free Shopping over 40 years ago. Through continuous innovation of their products, Global Blue has become the leading strategic technology and payments partner for Tax-Free Shopping, Payment, and RetailTech ecosystems. Their solutions empower retailers to improve their performance and create a better experience for shoppers.
To provide their global audience with a seamless omnichannel experience, Arvato Systems implemented a new website powered by Magnolia DX Cloud.
The Challenge
Scaling a Global Experience Beyond Language Barriers
When Global Blue began to scale their digital strategy, their plans to improve customer experiences exceeded the capacity of their previous CMS. It could not keep up with the demands of a modern global omnichannel digital brand, posing particular challenges in multisite and multilingual capabilities. The team faced substantial translation costs and lengthy timeframes, as initial machine translations lacked the necessary business context, leading to a dependency on manual proofreading and external agencies.
The goal was to meet the unique needs of travelers, retailers, investors, and job candidates by delivering a consistent, fully standardized user experience across all channels and devices everywhere in the world.
The Solution
Unifying the Brand Voice with Intelligent AI Translation
Global Blue uses Magnolia’s headless architecture to seamlessly integrate with a front end built in Angular. While Magnolia provides a flexible and scalable solution for content management, the Angular front-end provides a modern and dynamic user experience. As Global Blue uses headless content in Magnolia, it also powers their mobile app.
To address the multilingual challenge head-on, Global Blue leveraged Magnolia AI. Delivered by Platinum Partner Arvato Systems, the solution adapted Magnolia DXP’s Extended Translation Module to integrate with Azure OpenAI. This powerful combination provided superior, context-aware translations while keeping all data private, moving beyond the limitations of their previous setup.
Global Blue also leverages deep integrations in their website and app, including a comprehensive store finder and customer data for personalized recommendations drawn from Salesforce.
The Result
A Revolution in Efficiency, Cost-Savings, and Speed
Magnolia is now Global Blue’s content hub, powering experiences in every key market, including China. The integration of Magnolia AI has revolutionized their content workflow. Global Blue achieved substantial financial savings by entirely eliminating their previous translation process. They can now instantly translate English originals into 14 languages with only simplified proofreading required, holding all content ready for publication within seconds across their website, mobile apps, and customer portal.
translated instantly and published across channels, dramatically improving speed and consistency for all key markets.
Furthermore, Magnolia AI automates the generation and translation of SEO meta tags and image alt tags, dramatically improving efficiency and consistency. By harnessing headless content and Magnolia’s deep integrations with Salesforce, the Global Blue team is now not only able to deliver for customers today but also has the tools to adapt and improve whenever they see an opportunity.
