Never Sacrifice Quality for On-Time Delivery

Introduction

Beating your competitors doesn’t happen only by being faster. It comes from offering better quality to buyers. Explore why you should keep the focus on quality.

Differentiating yourself in the marketplace has never been so challenging. In a globalized economy linked by the instantaneous communication of the internet, consumers can find and evaluate more options than ever. This is true even in the B2B space and highly niche industries. No matter how obscure your product or service, you can be sure you aren’t the only business providing solutions to other companies or the general public. That puts a heavy burden on businesses to find ways to maintain a competitive edge.

Cost is the first place most managers and owners think to make changes. Surely if the items or services you provide cost less, more buyers will gravitate towards your product, right? In reality, this is a common misconception. While certain buyers will always opt for lower-cost options out of preference or necessity, most buyers want something that reflects the key aspects of quality—even if that means it costs more.

What are those Key Aspects of Quality?

"While certain buyers will always opt for lower-cost options out of preference or necessity, most buyers want something that reflects the key aspects of quality—even if that means it costs more."

Axel van de Worp, Localization Expert

How does a consumer decide that a business is trustworthy and worth supporting based on quality? Although these are fundamental metrics, it’s not just about how good a product looks or how well it functions. Some of the other elements that mark you as a “business of quality” can include:

• Usefulness—How much practical utility does the product provide? Is it as functional as advertised?
• Durability—For products, does the item last? Can it stand up to the test of time and remain useful?
• Suitability—How closely does the product or service match what a buyer needs it to do for them?
• Information—How well do you communicate with buyers? Do they have all the information they need to understand, use, and enjoy what you offer, or do they struggle with inadequate materials and poor communication?

Some quality aspects might be out of your control, such as relying on third-party vendors to produce components for a larger assembly. Other times, you can play a critical role in ensuring that your business outputs consistent-quality goods, services, and communications. Recognizing how much control you have over this aspect and areas that need improvement can help you develop new strategies.

Surviving in a Competitive Space

It’s one thing to think about the importance of quality, but what happens when you’re in a highly competitive space? What if your biggest rivals are already penetrating a new market you want to capture? Such a scenario, which is not uncommon, can put even more pressure on your business to move faster and do more.

Should there be less focus on quality if it means achieving a swifter speed to market? It seems to make sense—you can continually retool for better quality later once you have gained access to the market.

You could take that approach, but it wouldn’t be wise. In fact, that could be the worst possible choice to make. Consumers notice these differences. By the time you start focusing on improving quality again, buyers may already be abandoning your brand. Quality and reliability need to be established early as core elements that make your business the best choice. This goes beyond the products themselves.

Let’s explore the advantages of balancing the need for speed with the uncompromising demand for a high-quality output from your business. Excitingly, there are some groundbreaking new enterprise translation services that can help you meet these goals.

"Quality and reliability need to be established early as core elements that make your business the best choice. This goes beyond the products themselves."

Kristina Møller, Localization Expert

Understanding What You Need to Break Into a New Market

There are four key preliminary steps to undertake as you prepare to engage in localization work.

• Understand the scope of your target markets. How you communicate, and the type of material you translate, will vary based on your target. You must speak differently to a B2B target in the industrial manufacturing sector than you would a toy retailer looking to chase the latest trends.
• Know your target audience. Understand that there may be differences in how to best communicate in other languages. Explore strategies for preserving your brand voice and values even in other languages. While the nuances of language may be less important in technical documentation, there are many cases where a familiar voice matters. Native speakers know when something doesn’t sound authentic.
• See what your competition is doing. If your competitors are already active internationally, investigate what seems to work for them. At the same time, this is a valuable chance to see what isn’t working and identify areas where you can move in swiftly.
• Arm yourself with advanced technology. Through research, analysis, and thorough planning, you can set yourself up to make a strong start. Empowering your business to make headway in new markets requires something more: the right tools to stay in control of the process. 

At Straker, we have a deep understanding of the challenges businesses across all industries face in this area. That’s why we’ve developed a high-value enterprise translation platform that will be the bedrock of your next campaign.

The Positive Effects of Processes That Emphasize Quality

It is essential to take a step back and evaluate how a business handles its production processes. It’s easy to become so absorbed in day-to-day operations that you lose sight of how the company actually performs. Why should you inspect every aspect of your operations to see if you’re achieving the quality that your brand represents?

It’s about more than converting a lead and making a sale today. Quality produces these four positive effects:

• Quality is the key to long-term sales, not just a one-time purchase. A buyer who has a smooth experience with your business throughout their buying journey, from research to purchase, is one of your best assets. Their satisfaction with your product and the associated experience translates into positive word of mouth, real social proof, and a greater chance for repeat sales. The alternative is a buying experience that only works once—leaving the buyer disappointed and unlikely to return because they could not find what they needed.
• Quality defines how buyers and potential buyers think about your business—it builds your reputation. Customers remember quality, from how you share information to the end product itself. They’ll remember you next time, too.
• Better quality lets you differentiate yourself in a space where buyers may not expect such results. Especially in foreign markets, buyers may often encounter poor quality from international brands. By focusing on good results with the best possible speed, you strengthen your reputation as a trustworthy brand.
• Save money long-term by avoiding the problems of poor quality control. Inferior products do more than annoy customers—they also aren’t fun for your teams to deal with. Poor quality often means doing the same job repeatedly, wasting both time and money.

It’s natural to think only about the actual goods and services your business provides when discussing “quality,” but that overlooks a key area: communication. In non-English speaking markets, communicating with customers in their own language is essential to establishing a foothold. If you aren’t just as focused on quality in how you communicate about your products as you are on their manufacture, you can still lose out. Why?

Quality Isn’t Only About Products: How You Communicate Matters

The first time a potential buyer interacts with your business, it likely isn’t through a direct experience with your products. Most often, that first point of contact will come during the research stage or as a result of your own marketing. Imagine researching a widget company that sells a product you need, but their website contains broken English and product descriptions that are hard to decipher. Would you feel inspired to buy?

Of course not—and the same is true no matter what market you want to reach. That effect is why focusing on speed over quality, especially in localization processes, is self-defeating. The only solution is striking a balance between the two—working quickly and producing high-value output. Of course, that is easier said than done.

You know how to control messaging in your home market because there is no shortage of fluent speakers to build your content. However, as companies expand around the globe, they increasingly rely on third parties for web content localization, product descriptions, support materials and more. Confusing, disconnected processes for issuing these jobs combined with irregular efforts to source good translators can cause cost overruns and produce poor results.

When it comes to translation, “good enough” simply isn’t good enough.

"Translation and localization are critical workflows for international market operations, but speed overtakes quality in these processes too often. Even large businesses struggle with balancing the need to reach markets quickly and the desire to communicate well."

Kristina Møller, Localization Expert

Is Your Business Falling Short?

Translation and localization are critical workflows for international market operations, but speed overtakes quality in these processes too often. Even large businesses struggle with balancing the need to reach markets quickly and the desire to communicate well.

Translations can often be a bottleneck in the process to release a product or service, leading many managers to wonder—should we sacrifice a bit of quality to save on time? We’ve already considered the adverse effects such an approach can have. Instead, it’s time to consider how to retool your work in this area for a better balance and improved results.

How Straker Helps You Achieve Quality On Time

With a better approach to procurement, management, and validation, it is possible to transform your localization efforts into an engine of quality. These services can and should mesh seamlessly with the whole of your business so that translation is just another step on the road to successful product launches. At Straker, our innovative and all-in-one RAY platform puts the power of careful management and AI translation at your company’s disposal.

Better quality communication starts with reining in rogue spending and piecemeal processes for issuing jobs. With the RAY Cloud dashboard, you can manage every translation project in one place. See progress, job aging, cost, and other reports on KPIs to understand the health of these projects. Good results stem from strong management, and RAY Cloud is easy to learn and use.

Waste less time finding professionals with industry-specific expertise. Whether you need highly technical documents for the oil and gas sector translated or you want to create web content in “slangy” local dialects, finding the right talent has always been challenging. However, our crowdsourced vendor selection tool makes it easy to find proven, trusted, and thoroughly evaluated professionals to work on your project.

We’re not a mere basic translation technology partner—we’re AI-enabled, too. With RAY Cloud's API and the RAY MT platform working in concert, your translators will produce superior quality results that will continue to improve over time. How? Machine intelligence.

Today’s best results originate from a collaborative work process between humans and machine counterparts. While your experts render your content into the target language, the RAY MT system learns as they work. With the use of translation memory (TM), the platform remembers the words that the MT engine and the human linguist have already translated.

As you feed more content through localization processes, RAY becomes faster and smarter, using TM to automatically translate recognized words and phrases. This enables your translators to produce results faster, keeping accuracy rates high and costs low. You pay nothing for duplicate translations, so your price per word decreases over time. The platform even includes a validation center where your selected reviewers can provide feedback on translations, add directly to the translation memory bank, and approve or decline jobs.

With a solution that overhauls the localization process from end to end instantly, balance becomes possible. Not only do your teams have the tools to issue translation requests in an orderly fashion, but the results come faster without sacrificing quality. 

The result is content of any kind that communicates effectively with your audiences around the world without sacrificing the value of speed to market. Can you say that your current setup achieves the same?

Do You Have Safeguards in Place to Protect Quality?

Speed can dominate a company’s considerations in highly competitive spaces, especially when entering a new market. However, as we’ve seen, this is a self-sabotaging strategy. Going faster for the sake of beating out the competition won’t achieve your goal when your competitors are able to field better results and communicate to buyers about them more successfully. Do you have the tools necessary to make your business resilient enough to win in this space?

With powerful new solutions, including AI translation software, you don’t have to sacrifice quality for speed or vice versa. Instead, you can focus on ensuring that quality is baked into every aspect of your business—from initial production to post-sales support and everything in between. With a better, faster and more cost-effective way to communicate with your global audiences, you can embrace those exciting markets flush with demand for what you’re selling.

How much better could your business be at providing buyers with exceptional outcomes? Explore an audit of your existing approach to translation services and start discovering how quality communications don’t have to sacrifice speed.

"With a solution that overhauls the localization process from end to end instantly, balance becomes possible. Not only do your teams have the tools to issue translation requests in an orderly fashion, but the results come faster without sacrificing quality."

Kristina Møller, Localization Expert