More than ever before, corporations are redefining the ways in which customers interact with them. For every Amazon and Zappos, that build their brands around the customer experience, there are many more companies that have moved in the opposite direction, making it more difficult than ever for consumers to speak to an empowered representative that can answer questions, provide expertise, and deliver solutions.
By including an FAQ page on their website and a helpdesk that responds, via email, within 24-48 hours, they have justified removing their phone number from their website and breaking the important link between customer and company that has driven businesses like ours to success. Some of the justifications for this lack of customer care include a lack of or redeployment of funding, a need to streamline operations, or a shift in a company’s core offering which management believes does not require direct verbal support by the company’s precious human resources, its employees.
As the language services industry becomes an increasingly fragmented and competitive space, translation companies have had to find ways to remain profitable amidst pressure from clients to lower prices, while vendors raise the amount they bill per word. Translation technologies have permitted translation companies to find efficiencies; however, in an effort to maximize profitability, many of our competitors have focused their efforts on minimizing overhead, making operations as lean as possible, and as a consequence, the end product and the customer experience have suffered. We hear this on a regular basis when clients come to us after having had an unfortunate experience with our larger competitors.
Buying translations can be a confusing experience given the blitz of marketing claims and specialized terminology associated with this niche industry. Prospective companies can dazzle with their ISO-certified process, global footprint, enormous pool of vendors, translation memory systems, machine translation engines, client portals, and more, but in fact these are basic tools in the arsenal of any serious language provider. The magic is not in the tools themselves but in the people who wield them.
What makes for a great translation company are the mindset, culture, and ultimately the values that drive behavior and thinking on the front lines. To actually deliver on the promises that most LSPs make, technical know-how is required to use technology properly, but more importantly, time must be invested into analyzing a project and becoming familiarized with the details that will make the difference between a flat translation and a world class message.
Relatively speaking, it’s easy to convey millions of words from one language to another; it’s another matter to do so at scale, in incredibly tight timeframes, using dozens of different technologies, following brand guidelines that were likely written in English, and considering cultural nuances in the target market. The only way to deliver a world class product under these circumstances is if one takes the time to really care.
In our company service is king. Only with an incisive understanding of a project’s nuances can a 20 step workflow across 30+ languages be developed and executed within two weeks. We do this day in and day out and we don’t take the easy way out, ever. Without the client-centric mentality, Protranslating simply would not exist as an organization. We would be just like many of our competitors, processing millions of words for the sake of generating an invoice.
It takes a special kind of person to work for our organization, and because of this we put a lot of stock in our recruiting process for both our in-house team and our freelance vendor pool. A full quarter of our employees has been with the company for over 10 years, and the core values established by our founders are what we embrace today as the cornerstones of many of our internal processes, including hiring, training & development, recruiting, performance evaluation, career advancement, and the like.
For more than four decades, delivering world class translations has been foundational for Protranslating, but that foundation is held together by our service commitment which means giving our clients a red-carpet experience with every job.
In an age where service has fallen to the wayside, Protranslating proudly stands out as a company that is 100% dedicated to delivering the best customer experience available. We believe that in order to succeed as a business, the proper technologies and processes are necessary; however, ultimately it’s the people that truly make the difference and at Protranslating our clients know our team has their best interests in mind.
