Automatyczne powiadomienia e-mail w biurze tłumaczeń

Automatic e-mail notifications in the translation industry

As a translation agency manager, you are performing various key tasks that are necessary for success of your business. These tasks include: taking orders, quotation, finding vendors that are able to take your order, overseeing translation process, settlements with vendors and customers and customer service. Have you known that most of those tasks can be automated to a grater or lesser extend? Today I will share some valuable tips related to customer service automation with you. Implementing them will help you save your precious time and increase customer satisfaction.

If you want to learn more about autiomation and which processes can be automated, see this blog post >>

E-mail / SMS notfications

One of the easiest and the most offective ways of saving your time (and increasing customer satisfaction) is setting automatic notifications. One of the Industries that make great use of them is e-commerce.

On-line stores generate automatic notifications related to order confirmation, verious steps during order processing and quite often after order fullfilment, by asking about product and service quality. Since such system works perfectly, why wouldn't you try to implement it at your translation agency?

Which notifications work best at the translation agency?

  • Order confirmation - when customer completes the form on your website and sends inquiry. It's worth to notify your customer that you got the inquiry and will take care of it as soon as possible.
  • Quotation - as soon as you know the quote, send automatic notification to your client. In such message you can also include number of signs / words / pages together with corresponding rates and the date of order fulfillment. If you charge your customers in advance, you should also include payment link.
  • Payment confirmation - money is an important aspect of everybody's life. Every customer wants to know that her money have been transfered succesfully.
  • Start of the translation process - this notification is optional and it's up to your business model. You can notify your customer that her files had been distributed to the vendor and the translation proces has started. It gives your customer the essential feeling of having full control over the order exacution process.
  • Order finalization - when the translation is ready, you can send automatic e-mail notification with translated documents attached.
  • Automatic invoice send out - avoid unnecessary activities - issue and send invoices to your customers automatically.

What esle can you do?

  • Illegible scans - your customer sent you illegible scans or documents? Think of a solution that allows you to mark such files and generate automatic notification to the customer, including names or even whole illegible files attached.
  • Request for ratings - a few days after delivering translation ask your customers what they think of translation quality. It would be perfect if your system could automatically assign those ratings to a given vendor, so that you can easily detect vendors of good or poor quality.
  • Vindication - are you fed up with writing e-mails with a reminder about the payment of overdue invoices? Automate this process and save your precious time!
  • Abandoned cart - a customer filled some data on your website but haven't completed the order? How about sending an e-mail with a reminder or asking him about the reason for not completing the order?

How can you implement automatic notifications at your translation agency?

In order to automate e-mail or SMS notifications you need to implement appropriate software that allows for order registration and distribution. Unfortunatelly, standard mailbox is not enough to generate automatic notifications. What elements should such system contain?

  • Order list - which will allow you to manually add orders sent by e-mail and register orders sent by the form on the website.
  • Order statuses - the system must allow assigning statuses to orders that will trigger automatic e-mails.
  • Automatic e-mail communication - maybe it seems to be quite obvious, but your software has to be able to send automated e-mail or SMS messages.

Of course, this is just an absolute minimum that will allow you to implement basic e-mail notifications. Here are some additional ideas:

  • On-line payments, sending a payment link together with order confirmation or quotation.
  • Invoicing and vindication, together with automatic e-mail send out.
  • Order form on your website, that registers abondoned carts and informs your software about such event.
  • Vendor management portal, together with vendor rating, so that you can collect your customers' reviews and ratings.

There are vast of possibilities and each of them is designed to increase your productivity, facilitate your daily work, minimize costs and provide you with competetive advantage.

Summary

The automation of customer service at the translation agency is a significant step forward in terms of improving the quality and efficiency of your work. One of the key elements is the automation of e-mail and / or SMS communication. Customers will appreciate that you keep them up-to-date on all activities related to their order. You, in turn, will save valuable time that you can spend on further development of the company.

More articles on customer service automation comming soon.

If you are interested in customer service automation, please contact me. I will gladly help you and tell you more about the benefits of translation agency automation.

 

Mike Walachowski
Michał Walachowski
Head of Growth