Translations.com’s new customers were struggling with the WPML integration. WPML’s Translation Readiness Service helped them go from “pulling the plug” to “peace of mind.”
High Expectations from Translations.com Customers
With over 25 years of experience, Translations.com has helped customers with over 400,000 projects. About 70% of their clients are enterprise-level, which means they come with complex projects and high service expectations.
Translations.com became a WPML partner in 2015 to expand their specialty in translating WordPress sites. “There was a lot of interest in this integration,” Nick Panagopoulos, VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Translations.com, told us. “Shortly after partnering with WPML, we started to see our demand for supporting WordPress grow.”
With New Customers Comes New Growing Pains
As the number of WordPress customers grew, technical issues did as well. “When you have a lot of sudden interest in something, any kind of issue, though it might be small, is much bigger,” Panagopoulos explained. “We were seeing a number of challenges with shared deployment.”
Customers were under pressure to start translating as soon as possible. This stress, combined with varying degrees of technical knowledge, caused WordPress managers to make simple errors like forgetting to configure their target language or selecting the wrong content for translation. These issues became showstoppers and led to a lot of frantic communication.
As a result, drawn-out support timeframes from dealing with panicked requests were lasting days, or even weeks. Leads on new customers were being delayed in favor of damage control.
Panagopoulos shared that it had reached a point where they were trying to decide if they were “going to have to pull the plug on the whole project.”
Lots of thought went into an elegant solution: by doing an early technical review and small test translation, we managed to eliminate all of these issues. Then, when it came time to send large amounts of content to translation, everything worked smoothly.
Coming Up with a Solution to Help Two Drastically Different Types of Customers
Translations.com determined that these technical deployment issues came from two types of customers:
- Customers with Limited WordPress Experience — These customers did not understand best practices when it came to building a multilingual WordPress site. Often, they were drawn to the free price tag of WordPress. They may have had an agency that specialized in front-end design create their website. When it came to troubleshooting issues, these customers lacked the technical knowledge to do so.
- Customers with Extensive WordPress Experience — These customers were drawn to the open-source WordPress software. Their advanced knowledge led to over-architecting their site and an excess of customizations, which would in turn clash with WPML and other plugins.
Translations.com required a solution that addressed both types of customers and provided the speed of service expected by their enterprise clients. They also needed to identify issues before they became urgent implementation problems.
To do this, Translations.com implemented WPML’s Translation Readiness Service. This service connected them with a WPML developer and support expert. This expert would review the sites of new customers for potential technical issues. Translations.com could then provide the customer with a list of improvements to make on their site. Once the changes were made, the connection process would be smooth and painless.
Implementing the Translation Readiness Service solved Translations.com’s major problems:
- It moved the discovery of issues to earlier in the customer relationship and became part of the due diligence phase of the sales process. This allowed customers to determine if making the necessary changes to their site was doable for them.
- It eliminated time-consuming troubleshooting by having a WPML professional conduct a thorough audit on the customer’s behalf.
- It quickly identified which customizations would cause issues and gave customers a concrete action plan to make their site multilingual-friendly.
Peace of Mind for Translations.com and Their Customers
It didn’t take long for Translations.com to start seeing positive results.
Since adding the Translation Readiness Service to their sales process, Translations.com has seen a significant decrease in support issues, and customers are much happier.
Customers have complied with fixing the issues the review uncovered. As a result, implementation is now a seamless process with no showstopping issues.
Customers are no longer escalating issues to Panagopoulos, meaning he can get back to signing new clients with confidence.
They’re saving time, saving money, and have not lost a single customer.
«We can rely on WPML and its service, and this audit process helps us ensure that this is going to work for our customers,” Panagopoulos told us. “It’s peace of mind that we didn’t have before, and it’s been great. It’s made a substantial difference.»
Start Offering the Translation Readiness Service to Customers
The Translation Readiness Service is already available to all of our translation partners. Contact WPML to start your own translation service success story!
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