In a world where AI is transforming language services, the human element remains crucial. While AI enhances efficiency and accuracy, it lacks the cultural awareness, empathy, and personal connection that define successful vendor and employee relationships.

Our presentation will explore:

– How to build trust and strong partnerships with vendors
– Why a supportive and engaging work environment boosts productivity
– The balance between AI-driven processes and human expertise

At Ciklopea, we believe that technology is a tool, not a replacement. By combining AI’s power with human insight, we ensure high-quality translation services and lasting industry relationships.

See you in Barcelona!

Want to connect?

Reach out to us before the event!

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Ciklopea’s participation underscores our commitment to continuous learning, staying ahead of industry trends, and enhancing our project management practices.

The event is an opportunity for professionals across the language services industry to network, exchange ideas, and explore strategies that drive innovation and success.

Stay connected for updates and highlights from this must-attend event!

Meet with Milena Matić

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If you are attending the Together 2022 event as well and want to schedule a meeting with Ivana, use this button:

Schedule a Meeting with Ivana

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If you are attending ND Focus as well and want to schedule a meeting with the Ciklopea representatives, please contact us via the form below:

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Together is Elia’s initiative dedicated to bringing together freelance language professionals and language service companies for constructive dialogue and mutual growth. Our aim is to provide a unique venue for all stakeholders in the language industry to openly discuss how to improve relationships and efficiency.

The focus for 2019 is Mastering Digital Transformation and features 2 tracks – Specialisation and Trends & Technology.

This event is for anybody who believes in the power and possibilities of strong relationships between freelance language professionals and language companies.

If you are attending Elia Together 2019 as well and want to schedule a meeting with the Ciklopea representatives, please contact us.

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Attracting and retaining clients

Complex public procurement processes, tenders, contracts and other bureaucratic nightmares are the cornerstone of every collaboration with a public institution, particularly a larger one. The beginning may be tough, but buckle up and be patient, for the end result is rewarding – a stable workload, a pre-defined system and rules and uniformity regarding text types and language combinations mean less stress for you throughout your contract period. However, unlike public organisations, which are governed by rules and legislative norms, private organisations are defined by a faster pace and more organisational changes – so after your sales representative has fought tooth and nail to attract a certain client from the private sector, it is essential for you to brush up on your soft skills and do your best to maintain and nurture a good relationship with the client in order to achieve some stability and, hopefully, do some cross-selling and upselling.

This gives you a serious opportunity to make a difference and to show that, ultimately, all organisation members work in the sales department, regardless of their position, since every little thing you do or don’t do when working with a private sector client affects the overall company performance.

Thinking and working inside and outside the box

After we attract a certain client, we have the job of actually providing the advertised service. For me, the greatest difference in dealing with clients from the public and private sectors lies in the workflow and process, i.e. the imposed system of the public sector vs. the one we develop ourselves for our clients from the private sector.

When working with clients from the public sector, we deal with a large, pre-determined system with defined rules and obligations. Thus, we have to work our way through a closed system within an obligatory framework. The CAT tool we use is usually pre-defined, the workflow is mostly standardized, and there are also no surprises regarding the language combinations, text types and formats, which are always uniform. This does not mean that working with public institutions is boring; on the contrary, bending the rules without breaking them and both adopting and adapting the imposed system is where the magic lies and what makes us rack our brains a bit. You can devote your time to forming a perfect, close-knit team of linguists, educating them and organising workshops; you can develop tailor made QA procedures based on the client’s feedback or create templates for the CAT tool you are using in order to speed up the process.

On the other hand, once you receive the first order from a new private sector client, you are the creator of the system, which means the sky is the limit (apart from the budget and deadline, of course). The Project Managers themselves define and develop the workflow, CAT tool and QA tool to be used, and the sole responsibility for the entire process lies with them. Moreover, there is a greater variety of texts and materials: you can expect to receive anything, from marketing materials, brochures and video subtitles to contracts and user manuals. Various text types also mean various formats, which gives you an opportunity to learn and grow together with your client – you can educate your client about various possibilities with certain formats and their compatibility with your CAT tools; you can explore various options in the tools you use every day but never knew existed, or develop a new interest and broaden your own knowledge.

Just a little of that human touch

A pretty simple but significant difference in working with clients from the private and public sector is the very contact with the client and the target audience. When you are dealing with a private sector client, you are usually in direct contact with the person placing the order.

The Elia Handbook for Smart PMs, Volume III, 2018

This allows you to recognise somebody’s needs and priorities, to think together with the client and instead of them – to identify possible pitfalls and also come up with brilliant solutions. This means greater responsibility, but it also gives rise to innovation and provides you with a chance to impress the client and develop a deeper relationship. There is also a considerable emphasis on the end-consumers. They are the ones providing the feedback and the input, while you and your client share the goal of providing the best service possible.

On the other hand, when working with a client from the public sector, you mostly collaborate through a closed and rigid system, usually via a portal. There is a strict procedure to comply with and the target audience which you aim to please is usually an in-house validation team or a reviewer. And once you realise you are running late with a delivery, you cannot really soften the blow for the client through a portal. However, the airtight system gives you less room to make errors, since the systems used in public institutions usually have their own checks and balances which prevent you from, for example, delivering the wrong file.

To sum up, there are numerous differences between clients from the private and the public sectors, and it would be futile to discuss which of them bring more advantages or disadvantages. Some Project Managers will naturally prefer the flexibility and creativity of the private sector, while others would rather opt for the order and stability of public institutions. What is important is to define your approach, learn to appreciate the advantages and optimise the disadvantages of all types of clients, and find your place in the sun, regardless of the framework within which you are working.

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We all know that we can deliver the best product in the world to our client, but if the client did not feel good working with us, if we failed to establish a relationship with them, they will likely not contact us again.

Being professional and punctual, always delivering what is promised, particularly in terms of quality and deadlines, nurturing partnership relations and open communication with the customer – these are all well-known and frequently described characteristics of a good project manager. They go without saying, and together they create a positive image of a project manager and the company s/he works for in the eyes of the customer on each individual project. But the role of the project manager in customer experience does not start with the project handoff and end with the delivery.

When starting to work with us, a customer embarks on a journey where they go through a series of our processes, which shapes their experience of how it is to work with us. Due to the nature of their position, the project manager is often the customer’s guide in this process with the role and responsibility to make the journey as smooth as possible. We often try to improve the customer experience with technology, by automating some of the tasks, such as quoting or feedback collection, by providing the customer with an insight into our processes or by making the processes more transparent. However, since the project manager is usually the one who remains in continuous contact with the client, the bulk of responsibility still lies with them.

Walking in the client’s shoes

Project manager’s linguistic, technical and organizational skills are a prerequisite for good project management, but when it comes to building an excellent customer experience, another set of skills needs to come to the fore. Just like their projects, clients come in all shapes and sizes and the PM needs to be able to recognize a client and identify and apply the right approach.

The project manager’s direct contact with the client allows insight into the client’s knowledge of our industry, their expectations and the purpose of the project and the PM’s role is to identify that information and adapt the communication and the organization of the project to make sure the project runs as smoothly for the client as possible. A mature customer might be interested in knowing all the tools that will be used during the project and all the details of the process, but a less engaged one might be interested only in the time of the project finalization and the quality of deliverables.

Our clients are manufacturers of medical devices, providers of tourist services or software developers. They all want to focus on what they do, and that is why they rely on you to be their guiding hand, their executor and advisor.

And this is where all the variety of knowledge and skills of a good PM comes into play, especially the diplomatic and organizational abilities. A good PM will use their knowledge and experience to assess what lies ahead at the initial stages of the project – identify the information that they have and that they don’t have, the risks and issues that may emerge during the project and to decide on the best way to proceed. They will ask the client for additional information, documents or anything else if they need to, but make sure to keep their communication balanced and organized, not spamming the client with too much unsolicited emails, questions scattered in dozens of emails or an avalanche of unnecessary information. The precision, timeliness and appropriateness of a project manager’s communication shows respect for the customer and makes them feel good about working with us. It shows that we are their partner who keeps their interest in mind and makes sure that they do not waste their time.

The Elia Handbook for Smart PMs

Building the Connection with smooth communication

We set up our processes and procedures according to the industries’ best practices. The processes are meaningful and logical to us, they follow our workflows, and they have often been set up from our own perspective.

But if they do not have the client in mind, they can frustrate the customer and make us difficult to work with. In such situations, the project manager can intervene and act as the customer’s advocate, facilitating the journey through different stops in our company, from onboarding to invoicing, sometimes even breaking down the invisible walls between departments to minimize the customer’s efforts. When a customer has a problem with invoicing, for example, the project manager can be the one to facilitate the communication between the customer and the accounting department and help bridge the gap between the two different sets of processes and procedures, the customer’s and our own.

Customer feedback is one of the most powerful tools in an effort to improve customer experience. It is often quite difficult to elicit feedback and businesses spend resources devising surveys and questionnaires to collect the client’s opinions and feelings about their cooperation.

A project manager is in a privileged position by communicating with the client almost on a daily basis, and through establishing a relationship with the client, s/he can get a first-hand insight into the client’s thoughts and opinions. Not only does such a direct and live feedback make it possible for the project manager to adapt to the client’s expectations from the project in real time, but it can also be a valuable source of information for general process improvement and it can help the company bring customer experience to a whole new level.

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If you are attending Elia Together 2018 as well and want to schedule a meeting with the Ciklopea representative, please contact us.

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The third Elia Together will take place in Athens, Greece, 22-23 February 2018 and its theme is Specialise to excel that will be covered through three tracks dedicated to Specialisation, Trends and Technology respectively, each moderated by an experienced industry professional.

Marina Orešković, Chief Operating Officer at Ciklopea will moderate the Trends track, thus advancing the long time collaboration between Ciklopea and Elia.

We hereby invite our colleagues and partners to apply for Elia Together 2018 and thus take part in an interactive exchange of knowledge and get an invaluable insight into the latest trends and developments in the language industry.

To learn more about the programme and the venue of Elia Together 2018, please click here.

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Smart Differentiation

Sales and marketing is not exactly the smoothest aspect of the language industry and the struggle to find the perfect way of presenting and selling a linguistic solution is real. This is why this type of event was just perfect –fresh ideas, experiences and perspectives exchanged during the workshops have all been a great food for thought.

The presentations that stood out for me in this regard included Adding tangible value to the customer experience and How the framing of price impacts the bottom line, both by Richard Brooks and Samantha Brown. It’s sometimes good to remember the basic principles in any line of work, such as that we should aim to differentiate on the basis of the value we provide to our clients, not on the price, and to remember that we are selling sophisticated solutions whose true value may only grow over time.

In line with this, I quote Andreas Förster:

“When your client asks you why your competitor sells for cheaper? Because he can!” – and this is very true. High quality solutions are never cheap, but their ultimate value and prevention of language-related disasters makes them cheap in comparison. The real challenge is to communicate this message to the clients and this is why the events like these are organized.

Zana Boljkovac, Ciklopea and Françoise Bajon, President of Elia

Dynamics, change and adaptation

What I felt was the underlying message of all workshops and presentations was that sales and marketing challenges in the language industry should and can be only addressed by the change of mindsets, understanding the client’s perspective, a proactive approach and keeping up with the dynamics of the times. Every question can be answered if we have a deep understanding of the customer’s requirements and the place, value and requirement for our solutions in their work. The magic word remains because.

Elia ND Focus Sales & Marketing was a groundbreaking event, the first of its kind and it overcame my expectations. The fact that workshops were held by the subject-matter experts and actively involved our peers, marketing and sales specialists working in the language industry, and people who face similar challenges and develop answers to them, made this event truly special, professional and relaxed at the same time thanks to mutual understanding.

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The goal of the ELIA Exchange Initiative is the strengthening of cooperation between the member universities and the member companies of ELIA (European Language Industry Association). One of the objectives is the promotion of the exchange of knowledge via the ELIA Exchange online database that includes students, universities and companies willing to secure internships for the students of translation studies.

More workshops at the member faculties are planned in 2015.

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The forum hosted by the first host faculty – the Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek – drew representatives of universities based in Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia, as well as representatives of the industry headquartered in Croatia and Slovenia. Some of the main discussion topics pertained to undergraduate and graduate translation study programme quality and type, open-doors days hosted by companies in the region, opportunities for professional training of students during and after completion of their study, as well as the EE on-line database containing students, universities and companies which are ready to provide internships to translation graduates.

Ciklopea, acting as the Western Balkans regional coordinator, successfully presented the EE initiative and directed the forum in cooperation with the Faculty of Osijek. We would like to thank the host Faculty and all participants for the presentation of their own programmes, and for high-quality and productive discussion, as well as their readiness for continued cooperation in 2015.

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The membership in ELIA provides a good platform for training, technology transfer and an active exchange of experiences. This industry association also promotes the joint development of ideas and standards and facilitates stronger and more solid business relationships between translation service providers and suppliers of technology solutions.

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