Running a Language Services business is tough. Dealing with demanding clients on tight deadlines with stringent quality requirements and having remote contractors performing the work in every corner of the globe is certainly a unique business model.
At Payment Rails, we’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the best language service providers in the business.
On top of a great payment experience, we think there are a few other things that set some language service providers apart from the rest:
Language service providers that stand out against the competition have a vetting process that makes sure they are working with the best translators in the industry. They implement a multi-step onboarding process that vets translators on a number of factors, including:
Language service companies are similar to any consulting or services business where the work they do is very project-based. Much of their business depends on reputation and that some of their clients come back and give them more projects.
The best language services companies have a focus on quality, and they have implemented processes to ensure only high quality deliverables make it to the clients. The best tactics we’ve seen are:
Great language service providers augment the work of their contractors with great technology, which helps them reduce the billable hours of their contactor for each project so that they can offer more competitive prices and enjoy bigger margins.
It can be tough to agree to a few hundred (or more!) a month to use a SaaS software to help speed up translation projects, but the extra bandwidth that you can take on when you optimize your processes more than makes up for the difference. This is extra true as your language services business scales up.
Here are some tools that we’ve heard great things about from our customers:
Of course, a cutting-edge platform to collect tax info and manage payouts to all of your contractors is a pretty good idea too. ;)
Language service providers that want to stand out should be doing everything they can to build trust with their translators. Trust is built by doing several things:
If your clients have to meet a new translator and work with a different person for each project you work on with them, you’re creating unnecessary friction.
By keeping translators happy with what they are doing, it means that they will stick around. A good sign of a well-managed company that cares about the people that work for them is that their staff tend to stick around. Other companies like to do business with well-managed companies.
Starting the translator to LSP relationship off with a polished experience provides an excellent first impression. The LSPs that work with Payment Rails understand this, and they use our Translator Portal product to provide a smooth online onboarding experience for translators to provide their payment details and tax information.
Language services agencies are often quite remote friendly, and it can be hard to build culture and increase team happiness while remote. A few tools we like for this:
Great teams provide great service. You can increase your chances of delivering your customers great service by investing in your team, in the tools to make your team more productive, and in processes to increase professionalism and quality as your company scales and you take on eve larger contracts for your clients.
We hope this helped, and if we can help you with your LSP business mass payouts to your team members, let us know. :)
Tags: Growth, Online Marketplaces, Translation, Language Services