Our Analysts' Insights

Our preliminary review of the survey responses to CSA Research’s annual Global Market Study focused on the 195 largest companies in our Top LSPs™ rankings. The results show that a majority of these market leaders increased their revenue over the previous year with the same or higher profit margins.

Soliciting referrals and recommendations is an important sales technique that LSPs should pursue – whether or not they have a dedicated sales force. Yet even proactive referral requests aren’t enough to grow your business sustainably. Every provider needs a healthy supply of pre-qualified prospects to increase its chances of securing new sales. How LSPs find qualified leads varies from one company to another. What works? What doesn’t? Based on 497 responses in a recently published report, CSA...

Intel founder and former CEO Andy Grove wrote that, “Measurement against a standard makes you think through WHY the results were what they were.” Business-savvy organizations live by this dictum. They monitor various datapoints and develop key performance indicators (KPIs) – assessable values that show whether a company is meeting its strategic business objectives.

Buyers of language services crave the ability to measure translation quality in an objective way, get easy-to-digest reports on how it is tracking over time, and be able to drill down as needed for process improvement. However, quality control remains a mostly human-driven process – even when supported by QA technology – because humans have to sift through the reports these tools produce. What if there was another way to approach quality?

Like a leaky faucet, a process that creates losses here and there can amount to a big bill at the end. Yet, most language service providers pay very little attention to subtle waste, even when they abide by quality management systems such as ISO 9001. To achieve operational excellence, LSPs must systematically identify waste and strive to eliminate or reduce it.