Eleven things organizations can learn from airports

This is amazingly perceptive: Eleven things organizations can learn from airports. I think this is really more about the syndromes that tend to grow up around monopolies (if you don't like your grocery store you can go to a competitor, but you don't have such a choice in an airport). However, for those of us in big growing companies, we have to be on watch for the dangers of the monolithic organization where we just become a cog in a wheel.

...No one is in charge. The airport doesn’t appear to have a CEO, and if it does, you never see her, hear about her or interact with her in any way. When the person at the top doesn’t care, it filters down.
...Like colleges, airports see customers as powerless transients. Hey, you’re going to be gone tomorrow, but they’ll still be here.
By removing slack, airlines create failure. In order to increase profit, airlines work hard to get the maximum number of flights out of each plane, each day. As a result, there are no spares, no downtime and no resilience. By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system...

Customers Don't Want To Hear From You

Another great post from our friends at "HELLO, my name is": Customers Don't Want To Hear From You
After all the time localization companies spend chasing after the elusive big project, this post really tells the truth: The last place customers go when they have questions is to the actual company.

Instead of wading through the pages of some boring, bloated, antiquated, vain, salesy, marginally helpful corporate website, they’re clicking elsewhere...

Happy Holidays from Alex, John, and Ian

Using Social Media To Cover For Lack Of Original Thought

Funny because it's true...

Can a QA procedure fix cheap and shoddy work?

One of the hardest nuts to crack for any localization company is to recruit qualified and reliable linguistic resources. In the past, this was difficult enough and a plethora of tests and evaluation procedures were developed to try to sort out the good from the bad. 

This testing and selection process is difficult to refine, time consuming, and of course, costly for every company in need of the resources. The company must be able to boast to translation buyers, and make them believe, that they really do have the best and most suitable teams available for whatever subject matter that would fill the needs of their customers.

But do they really have the "best qualified and most suitable" people on the job? Given that the client expects and is promised to receive a high quality result, it is usually the case that the work is handed off to the lowest price resource that will accept the task. 

Is it any wonder then that we also see that clients are demanding some sort of QA standards be employed to show up any deficiencies in the deliverables at the end of the project? But how exactly does a set of standards or a QA process actually improve the quality of translation work that is performed by unqualified freelancers?

Admerix has trained teams of proven talented translation professionals. We don't need to continuously scour the internet looking for someone to take the work and then just hope and pray for a good result.

We know what we can expect, and we consistently deliver quality results to our customers and we don't get complaints.

How is this achieved?

The answer is simple. Stick to basic, proven, logical, workable, industry standard processes. We never try win a project on price (recipe for disaster) and we don't have to continuously trial new people and, after they pass the test, try to crunch down the price.

Our teams have been working with us for years, work exclusively for our company, and are only retained on our team by the delivery of consistently high quality work. But it is not cheap, and it is not done on crash schedules. 

When you want a professional translation or localization result, you must simply follow the process of applying proven industry standards, using only professional teams, overseeing the project by veteran project managers, and paying a fair price. 

Cheap and shoddy work will always be cheap and shoddy no matter what you try to do to it after it is completed.

Get it done right by starting right, processing right, allowing the right time frame, and paying the right price - or put more simply: the input will determine the outcome.