Thanks to Calvin Scharffs from our marketplace partner Lingotek, for sharing some industry insight. 

There’s nothing more frustrating than a company with poor customer service, that doesn’t anticipate clients’ needs or respect their wishes. If you’re selling anything online, especially globally, you want to make sure your customer is, if not happy, satisfied enough to avoid a fit of rage. But when you’re overwhelmed and overworked—during busy sales seasons, for example—you might not cater to customers at the level you want.

You always want to be the “good” company—but you can’t do that effectively without a streamlined workflow. One way to avoid dismaying customers is by ensuring your workflow is seamless.

A good workflow results in good service.

Think about all of the pieces of content you already deal with: social media channels, customer communication, internal e-mails, mobile content, supplier invoices and communication. Now multiply that by the number of languages you must translate your website into in order to sell to your global audience. Then throw in the constant updates to all those websites, the communication in different languages, the social comments, the seasonal spikes. Without an integrated workflow, you’re constantly on the verge of drowning.

The thing that many people fail to realize is that having everything in different places leads to a system where nothing is organized. Information gets misplaced or missed altogether. Mistakes start to creep into the workflow, leading to mistakes in the end product that affect the entire organization. Sales personnel with a high workload might find themselves not only missing their targets but alienating customers at the same time. Customer support reps spend too much time tracing the sources of problems that originated earlier in the work chain; inaccurate translations alienate foreign customers. Reputation suffers.

To get over these hurdles, it is best to integrate everything into one platform. That way, you can view and manage what is happening all over the world. The right workflow will support multiple apps, allowing you to carry out and manage different version of a system without having to jump through several different areas. You have all of your information in one place, so you can create content much more quickly and translate information with ease, regardless of where the customers might be based on the planet. Because your central interface provides transparency, mistakes are caught earlier in the process.

It seems like a simple modification, but placing your workflows into a single location has exponential benefits. The overall efficiency of the organization improves. The product or service is delivered seamlessly. Most importantly, the customers stay happy.

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