Today I'll talk about something small that can make quite a difference when talking with clients - customer service.
Even if you are a highly qualified translator, having stellar customer service helps in having the client come back for more projects and being overall more satisfied with the translation service as a whole.
There are several small tips that I want to give you in this post that can help you boost your client experience and hone your marketing skills.
First of all, I realized I sometimes - but not always - followed back on emails for tasks from agencies about the job being completed, or when this was assigned to me. Here I'm talking mostly about TMS where the task gets automatically assigned to yourself via website UI and zero human interaction (such as Phrase / formerly Memsource).
What I noticed is that the client was somewhat more likely to assign me to work more regularly and reactively when I followed up with a 'Thank you, this is confirmed.' or 'Hello, the task is completed.' email messages.
If I'd have to guess, this is because they would be more likely to remember me thanks to a more constant back and forth of communications. On top of that, replying, even with a short, simple, and gentle message tends to humanize the task.
This means that it's no longer about simply doing the job like a computer when we simply accept and click on buttons to deliver tasks.
Now, agencies are somewhat guilty of having this weird trend of 'dehumanizing' a bit the profession, such as when translators are addressed as 'resources', a term that just like most colleagues I don't like much.
However, I think it's possible to have a more human relationship with project managers and vendor managers alike by simply implementing this extra care in crafting email messages when communicating with the agency.
At the end of the day, if I have to put myself in a project manager's shoes, I think that some social connection with translators with whom I'd collaborate so strictly is only beneficial to the project, and helps build a mutual sense of trust and familiarity with each other.
Way too often, I used to not pay much attention to these social practices. Now that I do it with consistency, I started seeing agencies reaching out to me up to 25% more often as compared to when I do not write these kind follow-up messages.
I'd say this is proof that they had projects, small or big - they just assigned them to other people because I often wasn't the first person to pop up in their minds.
With marketing, I'm starting to think that a good deal of it is understanding the basic principles of the human mind and how we work in a society. And to provide stellar customer service, I think it all starts with small things such as these.
By implementing this method, multiplied with all my current and returning clients from now on, I trust to see more increase in human interactions within emails, with less dehumanization of the profession (especially for those working on the agency chunk of the market) and increased contacts from satisfied managers.