The provision of language services, understood as a professional activity, is a complex mechanism that requires specific cogs in the wheel to function correctly. In other words, translation is a task that can be completed in a mediocre way and without hardly any effort; however, when we aim to offer quality, relevant, long-lasting and effective results, we must pay attention to a number of determining factors that establish a well-defined, suitable and critical workflow. In this sense, the professional field of the industry offers several standards and guidelines to help us guarantee quality services. On the one hand, there exists the accreditation of quality standards, which allows us to verify that certain services have undergone comprehensive control processes that ensure that they have highest possible quality. These standards typically affect management processes or language processes. On the other hand, said language processes include countless theoretical and practical resources aimed at optimizing the processes of language tasks (translation, editing, correction, etc.) through techniques that focus on the translators themselves and through techniques that are applied through the computer programs that we use on a daily basis when performing our work. All of this enables the translation agency (and, of course, the freelance professional) to identify the consolidation of a comprehensive and efficient mechanism on which to base their processes and, at the same time, provide a quality assurance to their respective clients. This aspect is, in fact, one of the keys to the success of translation agencies, since, regardless of the quality imparted on language services, they need to earn the trust of clients in order to create a constant, profitable flow of work requests. For this reason, these agencies pay very close attention to understanding the strategies that allow them to establish these business ties and, even more importantly, to maintain them. In this vein, it is important to note that a thriving translation agency will emerge from the symbiosis between a studied client acquisition and retention strategy, using all the resources available, and an interdisciplinary work model that extracts the maximum performance of each professional involved and guarantees the quality of each of their contributions. Therefore, in today’s article, we will talk specifically about these good practices associated with customer loyalty, as well as the behaviors that we strongly advise against. First, it should be noted that translation agencies must find a way to treat their clients as individuals, for example, getting to know them and not treating them in a general way. While this may seem the most profitable in terms of time management, it may entail negative consequences, since it will give the false impression that specific needs are not being met and that the agency is only limited to receiving the assignment, carrying it out and invoicing it.
In today’s language services industry, clients are looking for business partners who help them internationalize their products and services. This is why they are so interested in finding a partner who truly understands their project, who becomes familiar with it and who creates the right dynamics to develop a consistent process when it comes to localizing the material provided to them in linguistic terms.For this reason, it’s essential to have conversations before starting to offer language services and understand what these clients know about the translation industry, since it may be necessary to clarify concepts (we mention some of the biggest misconceptions that people tend to have in Desmintiendo mitos sobre la traducción), identify their expectations and be aware of all kinds of special requests. This will provide the management team with the necessary information to form a team suited to these expectations and able to achieve the best possible results, either due to their specific knowledge in the area of expertise or due to some element of their translation style or how they use technology that allows them to undertake a certain project with greater chances of success. Once these matters have been resolved, we will have completed an important part of the planning stage, and the next steps will focus on the review stage and post-delivery follow-up. In fact, the life of a translation does not end when it is delivered to the client, since clients may have their own internal review team to take a closer look at the quality. Although the result of this stage cannot really be predicted at first, much can be learned from the expected final style when the client’s reviser shares their impressions with us. As a result, adapting to this style will be another essential key to making a good impression with the client. This relationship, nevertheless, can be compromised by any of the following behaviors. For example, some of the parties do not have enough information or make modifications to the projects, thus resulting in misunderstandings, such as adding/removing words in the midst of the process, modifying delivery dates, adding additional services to the localization assignment, lack of communication by any of the parties, or signs of inappropriate behavior. These red lines can definitively damage the relationship between clients and translation agencies. Therefore, we must develop a good incident management strategy aimed at always making the client see that their needs are our needs. This will gradually strengthen the business relationship and we will add to our list a permanent client who fully trusts in our capabilities.
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