Our Analysts' Insights

The last few months have been tough on everyone. After a couple months of indecision, many political leaders took the advice of epidemiologists and shut down all but essential businesses. With people ordered to shelter in place, LSPs around the world operated remotely with staff working from home. Our surveys over the last few months have shown the economic impact of the resulting decreased demand and uncertainty about how long they’d be shut down.

In late April and early May, CSA Research partnered with the Institute of Language Services, Hebei Normal University for Nationalities to survey 135 language service providers in China about their experience during the period when COVID-19-related restrictions were in force and what has happened since they were relaxed. As the first country to have experienced stringent limitations on movement, social activity, and work – as well as the first to emerge from them – the experience of Chinese LSP...

After taking temporary measures and expedients to continue operating during the pandemic, companies must now develop plans for what happens after COVID-19. They will do so against the backdrop of the two biggest concerns that CEOs of language service providers expressed in CSA Research’s mid-March survey: the existential threat of decreasing demand and uncertainty about how long the pandemic will last. While CEOs wrestle with those two issues, they have an immediate business challenge – how ca...

Loyalty will rise to the fore after the COVID-19 pandemic runs its course. People will remember the brands that reached out in meaningful ways during the crisis. Start planning now to take advantage of loyalty to retain premium customers through the crisis and beyond as you strive to support them during the ensuing ramp-up or recession.

Over the last 10 days CSA Research conducted several online group meetings with its various Leadership Councils and LSP research members, mainly CEOs of LSPs of all sizes. This executive brief summarizes and reports the themes, topics, and questions shared by members during these sessions. We arranged their input in four groups: Uncertainty, Business Planning, Operations, and The View Ahead.

With so much fear and uncertainty driven by the COVID-19 global crisis, there’s not enough information or solid data to make any reliable forecast about a global industry that serves many geographies, verticals, and applications. What we can say is that some companies will see more business, others no changes, and still others will lose clients or business. In the absence of primary data at this stage, what is certain is that leadership during the COVID-19 crisis is more critically important th...

Wouldn’t it be great if we could eliminate the Rashomon effect from the language services and technology industry? If somehow, we didn’t have to rely on guesses, estimations, or conjectures? That’s exactly what CSA Research does.

Growth is an imperative for LSPs, yet 40% of providers struggle to profitably grow their businesses. The situation is bound to get more complex as CSA Research expects a decrease in market growth rates due to a variety of factors including the overall economic slowdown, the impact of Brexit on business between the United Kingdom and its trading partners, the fallout from trade wars, and the impact of technology such as neural machine translation. But even with all that, the growth rates we forec...

When you clicked on the link that brought you here, you might have thought that someone spoofed Common Sense Advisory’s newsletter and hijacked you away from our blog. No worries. You are indeed at CSA Research, the company formerly known as Common Sense Advisory. This is part of our total redevelopment of our advanced research platform, brand identity, and corporate website.

The start of the new year is synonymous with a review and update of business plans. Successful companies conduct a yearly strategic planning session. Strategic planning is a process for defining a business strategy to shape and guide your operation. It focuses on a vision of the future and what you must do to achieve it. Executives use the technique to make decisions on what the company does, where it is going, which actions are required to make progress, what level budgets and which resources a...