I took a little time at lunch today to have another look at some articles that I had earmarked for future reading. I found a number of parallels between general business trends and what is happening in the language services industry in an article that was published in Forbes Magazine back in December of 2015 entitled Top 10 Business Trends That Will Drive Success in 2016. While all 10 apply in some way to the language services industry, I’d like to focus on the ones that really jumped out at me (and in no particular order), writing a post on each. They did so, because what is happening to us is happening in other sectors as well. The first topic is commoditisation.
“Commodity Products Will Continue To See Margins Erode. Services Will Extend Value.”
On first glance I didn’t really see the strong parallel, but the next sentence in the article made it clear, “Simply delivering a service will keep you in the commodity game”. Most LSPs are desperate to get out of the commodity game that is being driven by empowered, spoiled-for-choice customers; cheap online translation clearinghouses; a willingness to drop prices by LSPs and having freelancers as competitors.
The article goes on to say that companies need to differentiate on skills and expertise. This tells me LSPs should migrate away from price-sensitive, transactional projects to projects where people can add more value using their expertise or ability to solve problems. This is happening, but it should probably happen faster.
The author also said that specialisation attracts ideal customers. Anyone who has worked with me has heard me bang on about defining and attracting ideal clients…the ones we add the most value to. Get more of the projects that you do well, that you add value to, that you LIKE to do and that are, above all, the most profitable. Defining this is the first step. It’s critical that you communicate to the marketplace which clients you would like to attract. You must also make it easy for THEM to find you. As they say these days, the buying process is about 60% over by the time the customer calls you, so it’s essential to make it easy for them to find and get in touch (think good website, social media presence, etc.).
Since we are a services industry, I didn’t really get how the “Services Will Extend Value” applied. Then it occurred to me that we may simply need to offer different services that can extend our value. Although many projects, processes and tools are the same as they were 25 years ago, there is a whole host of language services that didn’t exist (or barely existed) then that are commonplace now: SEO/SEM localisation, transcreation, real use of MT, multimedia, social media and others. For a complete list, please refer to Inger Larsen’s and my post entitled Non-Traditional Services Clients Want LSPs to Provide.
We are experts at finding linguistic resources to help our clients communicate with employees, customers and community. Where else might we apply this skill? How else can we facilitate international communication using our skills as finders and assessors of linguistic resources? (Note the word translation was not mentioned.) There must be some opportunities out there. There must be more out there that will help us extend the value we provide our customers and help us get out of the commoditisation game.
Stay tuned for my next post which will focus on another area in which our industry is trendy!