Customer classification

My friends and subscribers include a variety of different people from the translation community: translation students and teachers from leading universities, translation agency project managers and sales managers, and customers, all with differing levels of familiarity with the translation process.

I hope I won’t be offending anyone if I say that we generally categorize customers by their level of maturity or understanding in terms of working with translation and setting deadlines and quality requirements for each order, and their familiarity with the technologies that can automate or increase the efficiency of the translation process. I believe that there are three types of customer:

• Those who are encountering the need to have something translated for the first time. Here, “manual” work is required: presentations, phone calls, additional – and brief – explanations (what editing is, why we use native speakers, the importance of layout work).
• At the next level, I would include those customers who have some experience and understanding of the process, set deadlines for all services, and have even heard of translation software such as CAT and QA tools.
• The most advanced customers are those who not only understand the basics, they are aware of the different types of services and technologies available, they work with a number of providers and, at this level, they are already looking for a way to “upgrade” their approach to working with providers. We recently participated in a tender where, at the meeting, the customer asked: “What can you offer us in terms of improving collaboration? Are you developing your own tools and what are you hoping to automate within the next three years?”

It is possible to categorize groups of customers further in terms of their understanding of translation as a process, but in any case, once customers reach the advanced level, there will be several members of staff within the company who work with translation technologies, including platforms. 

This raises a new question: how can you handle orders in such a way that some people only see their own, some people see all the orders for their team, and some people see everything for the whole company? We’re talking here about the need to manage access to information.

At Janus, we naturally work via our proprietary platform, GTP. We control access depending on how customers want their users to see the data presented, and create user groups: these might be teams or departments, or we might simply allocate roles with a defined level of access. This makes it easy for customers to check the status of their orders and navigate analytical reports. 

Did I mention reports?

P.S. Do you agree with this way of categorizing customers? How do you feel about technology in general?