S03E09: Client-Centric Enterprise Language Service Delivery

Christophe Djaouani

Good morning, welcome and bonjour and well, thank you very much for inviting me, Sultan, it’s great to it’s great to see you again.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Please, for the people who don’t know you, introduce yourself. Tell us what you have been up to as well.

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, sure, no problems. My name is Christophe Djaouani as a as you can hear my, you know, I’m, I’m French and I’m based in Paris. I started my career in New York 20 years ago as a as a project manager with RR Donnelley. After five years, I transferred to London to set up our global operation for the translation business unit. In 20… in 2005 moved to Paris to set up really a global sales team. Later moved on to director, VP, Managing director and couple of other executive position, joined SDL as you know in the executive team in in July 2018 when the Donnelley Language Solution businesses was acquired by SDL, stayed there three years and just started 10 months ago in this new adventure that is Toppan Digital Language and thrilled to be here.

 

And I just wanted to give you a little bit an update, right? So first like I say, it’s it’s great to speak with you again, very appreciate your angle in the industry, what you do, your authenticity. And it’s very good for me to be able to give an update on some of the progress that we’ve made since we talked and I think like our last talk was mainly towards M&A when we launch our, you know, our business. So together with my team we set up we, you know, we set out to build something really meaningful in the industry, believe it or not that’s how everything started and we wanted to be a partner that puts really the customer at the heart of everything we do and takes really a solution approach to our customer and and and we know that there are more and more complex need in the localization world, so I’m pleased to say that with the support of my colleagues that I called you know say the elite team, with me and the backing up of Toppan Inc right as we are thirteen billion dollar company and fifty five thousand employees worldwide, we are really making a noticeable impact in the market and our vision is really resonating with our customers. So, so you know we made the dream possible as well. So this is kind of where we stand as of today and again very pleased to be here.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Christophe, it’s fascinating that you took this idea, it was basically an idea a year ago, and you turned this into this massive battleship. Toppan Digital Language is making the news every day and there’s nothing short of impressive each time I look at your posts. Please share with us what is going on, on a macro level, what is Toppan doing? Who is it serving?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah and first thank you for the comment. I think what you can see towards some of the messaging that we are you know pushing through here it’s passion again I think it’s an important, an important word and I will say we have a team here who likes to win so we had, we have had a really an incredible first year and very proud to be, I will say, the fastest growing LSP in the market. So really going through and going back to our first you know podcast, through acquisition, so we have completed 2 acquisition in 10 months and through organic investment in sales and operation and this mixed really have delivered really major clients win this year as we started. So ten months, but as I say very great progress on many different fronts and there is a market for us.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

This time of the year, it’s middle of 2022. How has the year been so far for you at a personal level as well as for Toppan Digital Language in general?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Personal level, it has been busy, I’m going back to travel. I think the last eight weeks I didn’t even stay in in in Paris, so feeling strange to be back so still keeping the routine and the running that we talked about last time, Sultan. Right? In terms of business, enjoying the people that I’m working with and joining winning, we had a very strong start of the year as a business with you know our highlights being a number of very significant clients winning keyword you know in Q1 and just now we completed the acquisition of Translate Media in the second quarter. So for some of you who knows Translate Media, I mean I will say it’s bring a huge amount of talent to the team, great new clients in different range of sector as well, an incredibly impressive technology stack that you know kind of is very complimentary of what we had. I’m enjoying again speaking with spending time with developers, speaking with developer, I mean clearly it’s a very talented team in terms of developments that they develop a fantastic tool as well and they are, the mindset is really when we talk about customer centricity really here to solve customer problems and that’s really what they have and all of them.

 

So I’m also looking forward to a significant growth in the second-half of the year. So that’s just the beginning. So in you know remaining humble right of of what can happen but really looking forward for for second-half of the year based on the pipeline that we have as well.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Congratulations on all these achievements, but let us bring our focus to something you just mentioned, which is customer centricity, which is the topic of our discussion today. As an expert in this area, you are the perfect guy to ask about customer focus and how enterprises deliver translation services around that. Please give me a High level perspective and what your thoughts are on this subject?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, and I think it’s kind of critical and really the foundation of our success in addition to be again working with talented people and this is something that I have since I started in the industry as a project manager in in you know in in translation for capital market and IPO’s where you need it to be there for the customers sometimes 24 to 36 hours, you know in the office with the right team. So I think time change, but now you can really look at before was client first always now it’s really about customer centricity. So it’s more strategic and it is indeed customer partnering are absolutely fundamental to the localization industry for simple reasons that there is no one size fits it all to deliver services or solution across different industry departments or content type and different region as well that you can add on and I think you are well positioned to know that right? There is no one-size-fits-all and This is why the customer centricity is important in order to bring the right solution to the customer. So I will say that solution must being in some way tailored to the client needs and this across many different dimensions. So it’s critical also… the last element about customer centricity is really about listening to the customer, listening, thinking out-of-the-box. But also bringing them nowadays a lot of innovation and expertise in the localization, but also in the subject matter that they are operating, you know that they’re operating into, these ingredients are really key toward the customer centricity to brains or confidence, so expertise and more importantly, the credibility that it’s needed.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Every company talks about customer centricity. I mean, everyone would prefer to believe in that, that’s what they’re focused on, yet their processes, their strategies are not developed with customer in mind, it’s developed in silo. So where do you think the disconnect is, Christophe? Why do do they end up with a system that they think is right but the customer does not agree with?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, I agree with you Sultan. Many people say customer, customer… and I saw that in the past by the way, especially the latest one… but I I think that when you see you put the customer in the heart of it but technically no and there are, I mean there are quite few reasons why organization may become less customer centric, I mean sometimes it is a company culture as well. I mean it’s also coming from the top, right, depending on kind of the direction you going sometimes in the organization of it, it can be organizational structure, but also systems. Right? I mean this is in some companies the system is really driving so ways that people are acting and this you forget really about the essence about servicing the customer. And I think that you know our industry is exposed to a few factors that have made it harder to stay relevant to customer. And you know, I will say that the environment is changing and particularly for during the last five years, right, you can see that there are a lot of changes in our industry. So it has been hard for providers to adapt to their business and operating models quickly enough to meet the demand and the change of the customer. So that’s why I believe that these are the fundamentals reason why some of the company are not able to cope and culture being one.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Speaking of business models, a lot of them are built around the customer and the value that is created for these customers. It takes some thinking and creativity. In your case, you went through this exercise probably in the past 12 months. How should a language services provider reinvent itself with such a model if they’ve, you know, function like traditionally, but now they have to change. How can they actually wrap their head around the customer?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, it’s a very good question, Sultan. I mean, in my view, customer centricity is best designed to an organization from the start. And that’s why I kind of we all love the Toppan Digital, you know project, right, because I mean we’re starting from from from the existing of a base in in in Asia, but we even in Europe and the US we put it together already in 10 months and it can be quite hard to back engineer into very siloed businesses if you don’t start from scratch. So every, also, I will say that every function must have a relationship or touch point or an understanding of the customer and treat release or customers their North Star, which is very key. One relatively simple question any business can ask itself is how much management time is taking up talking about the customer versus other priorities can be so EBITDA, can be the vendors that you’re looking for, can be the linguistic and visual accreditation. No. So key here is that in all the discussions that you have inside your company, what is the percentage of this discussion being related to the customer. I will say that this is a simple KPI and simple way to kind of think and judge really how you know how your organization is customer centric.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And, what’s the magic number for this KPI? How much should they focus on customer? How much of their conversation should be sent around the customer?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Well, I think that you know you, you need to have kind of, I mean for me, I mean in terms of some of the meetings that you have with others, I mean it can really be, you know, moves and you know more than the average and it should be at the heart of everything that you discussed then it can be someone to want some other discussion in parallel. But I will say that 85% should be towards customer.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And and speaking of Toppan Digital Language. Please share with me how is customer centricity at the heart of everything that you do there?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, I mean I, I I suppose that you know there there are several factor about this customer centricity and what we do in Toppan Languages, and I would say number one is culture and behavior which means that all our management team and this is what I say and employees know that they are here to listen to the customer and to serve the customer. Another is also sector specialists go to market strategy. It’s related really to the to the go to market strategy, which really pulls in behind it the most relevant solution for the customer. So we like to talk about customized workflow solutions, so not only tech, only services that raise something that we put together based on the requirement from the customer.

 

I will add another key pillar is the way we organize ourselves around the customer and how we share information across our organization. You can have different type of of setup, same, I saw some in the past and somewhere you moves really accountability, ownership, entrepreneurship towards servicing the customers. So it’s very important that you keep an organization. I I kind of like flat organization because I believe that also so information are kind of transferred very quickly as well and specially customer information, so it providing you the opportunity to be agile and to react quickly also when there are challenges because as you know our industry is also subjective. So there are way where you need to kind of turn around and find solution to some of the problem and this is you know the organization of your you know your project management team, account management team is very key in terms of how you service a customer and towards client centricity sometimes what you can have is different way to service customer depending if your client is centralized or decentralized.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I’m guessing in order to provide the best service to a customer, you will have to segment them based on domain expertise, for example, if you’re talking especially with regulatory industry, right, if we, if you’re working with financial or health care and so forth. So do you need to deliver a different experience to each one of them, or it you know it’s an agile experience that it adapts to what they need?

 

Christophe Djaouani

So you have, you can have a go to market strategy which is more by sector but you cannot underestimate the sub segment inside this segmentation. So let’s say you have life sciences below, you can have you know different level, you know healthcare, different level finance. For example, below you can have private equity, you can have asset management, or you can have IPO, or you see what I mean? This is where you have vertical but then you have sub segment to take into account to bring even more expertise and no one, as of today in the industry, no one is really doing that.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

It is obvious, Christophe, that the customer wants to buy from companies that focuses on them, I mean the customer. We still see a lot of organizations in our industry that are trying to push their own solutions on the customers where the customer does not see a fit and and the question was why is that? Is it a lack of experience or expertise? Or these people fail to see the landscape or the customer demand?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, I think, I mean it’s it’s a different mix, right. I mean some some people do not adjust, some people do not want to adjust, some people do not want to list so I mean, there are different ways, but I I see because it is failure of the go to market strategy where any post segmentation I mean you talk about it before Sultan and about so segmentation especially in regulated industry orders, right because our industry is so fragmented, is so big that you know I mean you need to narrow it down ready of about where you want to add value to the client. So I will say also I mean poor segmentation either at the point of of the sales engagement, upstreaming the development of the solution as one, the reality here is that there is no, no, no one as an LSP as a full suite of services or solution that can really cover the entire scope. That’s today, that’s the reality, even if you know some say we can do it, the reality is that there is no… not enough solution or knowledge as well, or expertise to be able to do it as well. So I mean customer come with preferences, LSP is the most part we have a certain level of agnosticism and sometimes work with the broader supply chain or technical system. For me, I will say that the ecosystem is really important and this is where we are evolving towards the verticalization, segmentation, but ecosystem.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Every customer is unique as you mentioned and they have their own interests and interesting things about them. So, and, that’s very true in the enterprise space where every customer wants everything to be tailor made for them. Now you talked about this briefly earlier. How do you go about building a model that is appealing and attractive to all your preferred customers? Because you can’t be one-size-fits-all for everyone.

 

Christophe Djaouani

Correct, correct, and it’s important and made billions in some core foundations that have some universality and that also make it easy for customers to interact with us and to do business with us really. And then on top will be the more agile sector specialist group who are very close to the customer operationally. So again, a quick touch and very close relationship with the customer at the end of the day, there is like I say is a solution, but one big part of what we do is also relationship and it’s even more important nowadays after the prices that we just had to bring that to our customer.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

In other words, it’s customer service that drives the business. It should not be an afterthought. It should be something that should be the forefront of everything.

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, I mean for us, it’s something we have. I think it’s, uh, it’s something that remain I mean yes B2B and you know the way you service client is changing. The customer journey is changing as well. But one part which is not and what we all want in in our daily life whatever it is translation, localization or other banking services order, it’s customer service and clearly still makes a difference now. That’s my favorite. I mean there are different ways. There is different way to adjust, but it’s also the investment that needs to be made in in the overall team for the customer.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Christophe, as you can probably agree, our industry is undergoing some transformations like many other industries. You just mentioned that. And the focus is to save money, bring efficiency and speed with automation. So how does that affect customer centricity? For example, you know we have self-serve portals, lots of LSP’s have them now. Can the customers still be the heart of the business when we make them do some of this work? Or more importantly, do the customers feel that they are at the center of every?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, I think, I mean, I mean, I, I agree with you, Sultan. You know, I mean, you know that well, I mean our language, language services is going through a significant transformation, but I will say it’s not a linear progression towards automation. What actually happening is that the content supply chains are moving from a waterfall processes to a highly agile processes, and the type of contents are different. You can see as well whatever it’s regulatory or not, but it’s changing quickly. Sometimes there is standardization not is shorter. The type of document as well is different, content uses as well on how the content is used so with different level of quality for the content so content channels as well as diversifying also. So I mean certainly you can drill the full solution that may solve a part of that, but we see really digitization as driving more strategic conversation for the future.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let us look at how we can build a production model inside a language company that’s based on a customer centric business function. I can see sales focusing more on customers because that’s what they do and they cover their customers needs. How does production and project management place the customer and their full focus and in the center of everything that they do?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah. And I will say that, you know, I think in the B2B now I mean we can say sales, but I won’t bring up the marketing team as well. I will say that marketing team is as important as a sales team and as important as a project management team. So production and management team have different touch point with the customer and often their day-to-day manager of the relationship. And this is really how it goes, right. Then you get you know the marketing side in parallel as well to get more analysis and data towards the customer as well on different type of data. So you can adjust and improve your offering or some of your solution. Then the relationship between sales and operation is one of those that cannot be siloed, right? And it’s important that the system and processes that are in place are helping to share information about customer regularly. I saw a lot of you know dysfunctional uh, you know, approach or who are these really when it was kind of people who are kind of separated or that so. So combination of the alignment towards the sales, marketing and operation is very critical because then the information or share you are able to do the day-to-day, but you’re also able to anticipate so customer needs, so it’s short and long term as well. So I will say the alignment of this tricky function for customer is critical.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

For a program and enterprise localization program which is based on customer centricity, you would need to have the customer engaged. What is the process for doing so because you will have to see it from their angle as well. When and where does the customer have a say in how this model should be developed?

 

Christophe Djaouani

I think most of the time and what you can see and you, I mean, you know that there are plenty out there right now. It’s, I mean the customer now is really explaining what they want towards the RFP, right. So I will say that they already kind of have their mind towards where they want to go when the RFP is out now and drive peace out is that is where you can also bring an extra you know some extra help when you got the subject matter expertise order in saying OK we took into account what you said but there is also this, so you can actually be more kind of having a consultative approach toward what is existing, what is possible and at the end we are the expert, so we should be able also to find a way or compromise from the beginning to also say what is possible, what is not taking into account that everyone is looking to reduce the turn around time, right, everyone is looking to improve the quality and cost as well also maintain quality. As everyone says they are delivering quality, even if I kind of have some doubt on that. But I will say that these are the three criteria that everyone is talking about and this is what can be addressed directly into the RFP.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

We talked about customer focused organizations and then what their needs are, but they must evolve overtime with every customer, so their customers in every translation companies or their customers industries are going through all kinds of transformation you just mentioned.

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, I think that the business cannot hope to evolve in the right direction, unless it is close to and listen to the… and you have some company as well that that believes are better than the customer, which I think this is very dangerous as well. So going back to some humility as well, I mean this is the beauty of the customer centric centricity approach, right, is that you will really listen to the customer and if all the function are lined towards the customer and management function, you can also mention HR, you can also mention finance. I mean you know, I mean customer can see it because then broadly speaking, I mean the direction of the company will be clear.

And you know we are here kind of you know you know we are kind of in a tornado, right, where you have a lot of market share that you can you know that you can get really because of that as soon as you get this customer centricity approach, I mean clearly you can see that you know it’s kind of taking all or everyone coming to you because it kind of makes a difference. Right. So and the direction is clear. However there will always be you know decision to be made about certain developments and we build this through rigorous strategic plan as well which is grounded not just in listening. To our customer, but also really understanding the wider ecosystem. Again, I say for a second time, for me the future is not only about one side, it’s really about understanding the ecosystem position yourself inside the ecosystem because this is going to help also the customer, in a way.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

The good thing, as you mentioned about customer centricity is that you know what the customer wants. In situations when there is uncertainty on customer side about their future, like they don’t know where their industry is going, how do you strategically design your model to withstand different implications in the face of changes and customer industries?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, this is a good question. I mean for sure any business needs have to be resilient particularly when customer you know is in in a certain industry are facing challenges. I mean we saw that again with with some of the COVID you know effect right and but some of these are also short term of course and can be partially mitigated by diversification of customer geographically or industry. So there is also different ways to kind of revert that and to help some of the customer and other long term such as the decline of, you know, in bricks and mortar, I mean retailing and switch to e-commerce. Clearly we saw that but it’s a case of picking up the right trends to lean into but in broader terms digitization is a is a friend for any lisps in the industry as well. So this is really where we can you know support our customer.

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Sultan Ghaznawi

Christophe, let’s switch gears and talk about what it takes to develop this. So it takes a certain type of leadership, vision and willpower to build a customer focused enterprise localization service model from your experience describes that. Now I would like to hear from you what these qualities are in a leader and how should leaders stay connected with their customers to keep them at the core of their business.

 

Christophe Djaouani

It’s really about discipline. I think it’s really thinking about, you know, every day you need to think why you are where you are and what type of impact you want to have and also bringing the right people around you that things the same than you if you can, right? So you don’t get distracted, right? Everyone is here for common goals. Everyone is online. You just have to remind him, remember what is the goal? You also need to be up to date with some of the, you know some of the changes and to really add value. So when I mean some of the changes is really towards you know regulatory changes orders, these are very critical.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And what sets apart the successful LSP in today’s day and age is that they do not sell translation. You just mentioned that, but they sell language services responding to their customers desired business outcomes how do you build this type of a model where the customers desires or preferences or are at the heart of what all your processes, all your products?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, I think it’s going back by you know, the design of the strategy, the design of the goals of the objectives, the design of the tactics that you can bring also with the right people around you, the expertise and experience, I mean clearly you know at one point it’s expertise and experience and not really losing kind of focused towards accomplishment. So we see the laser focused towards where you want to go, what you want to provide and it’s more towards going towards the solution in the ecosystem, so don’t think small, but also don’t think only take on the translation, on the transcription on the… I mean at the end of the day what we need, what we need to sell, it’s truly a solution.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

One of the mistakes I’ve seen a lot of people make, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, as to think in generalities when it comes to addressing customer segments. We talked about customer segments earlier as well, but how do we fine tune our business models to address a unique profitable niche that we can happily satisfy and the same time we feel good about it?

 

Christophe Djaouani

I mean it’s going back to one of your previous question, right? I think it’s it is really important to commit to a sector and then to think about the subsectors, remember what I say about the finance, right, finance, asset management, IPO, private equity orders are the same on different you know on, on different verticals. So we have to be prepared to invest in sales, you need to be prepared to invest in business development and quite a deep understanding of business needs and these can grow on different fronts, right. You can bring people that are coming from the industry, so you find the right mix as well and whatever you develop is also close from the reality, and I mean not just from the perspective of language services. It’s more than language, to your point, it’s more than language. So subject matter expertise is more than language. It’s uh about really the verticals or subsegment and the entire ecosystem. So in many cases you will also need to build services that may only apply to that niche. I saw that in the past, right? There is couple of services or solution or customized workflows that only apply for a niche. And then you know all you can really integration that are specific to that industry we saw, we can see that more and more, right with the connectors coming where you kind of get the data upstream and you can you know you can really fully automate it you know the workflow process as well. So so connectors are really bringing that.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I follow up on that question, Christoph, is the customer maturity model, I know people talk about that in our industry. How does that play a role into customer centricity? For example, if we have an enterprise that has mature localization processes built in, it might be easier for us to adapt our processes to service them versus one that does not know where to go because in the past they have done things ad hoc and now they want to bring a structure. How do you address that?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, correct. I was always keen about the language maturity model. I think it’s a very good approach to see what else you can bring. So, but I will say it’s one element of the overall solution. I think you need to take into account that some account will never mature as well, right, and the ones that are mature, I will say that the way to kind of bring anything new, it’s really towards innovation of what I’ve seen in the past, right, because they are mature already. So in some instance you know there is no more efficiency gain that you can bring to them. But what you can bring is actually innovation, innovation on different front. While it can be media, it can be some models you know can be a different set of solutions that they need and that they didn’t have before. So as we know, there’s a lot of solution which are vertical and loads that are vertical as well. So there is always a way to position yourself with some innovation on some of the mature accounts.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Christophe, please share with us about the organizational structure differences that exist between a customer focused LSP versus one that was created based on a generic business template.

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, I think it’s for me… yeah, I think that, you know on the, on the generic centricity you can really see on the client centricity, the recent approach and you can test that when there is a problem. For example when an e-mail is sent and the reactivity of kind of the team, there is blocks that are, also by industry because you get this expertise. So I will say that there is different elements, the way that it’s kind of more horizontal, so ways that it is more by block as well of industry. There is a commonality right about system and because you need to do some best, there’s some best practices that are applicable, all of them, right? I think clearly you can also reuse what is applicable for one to the others. So there is kind of an element about what you can use which is similar, but also what you can add on that is very specific. And I will say that not many people now go for the specific and they just remain generic and it’s the same in terms of your organization platform, right? The way you organize your platform shouldn’t be generic, right, but should be really tailored towards industry verticals that your customer is in.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

We are right in the middle of 2022. It’s actually June. So it’s the six months. Where do you see customers in the typical localization buyer customers segment headed this year about, you know what, what do you predict?

 

Christophe Djaouani

Well, I can see that there is a there are still or there is a lot of changes coming in the industry and I will say that you know so, so the customer coming are becoming more and more demanding as well or more knowledgeable on our industry. Since they are really looking at, you know, people thinking outside the box and these are lots that going through RFP. I think it’s the right time as well to think you know after, you know after what we went through for the last couple of years about looking at some different approach as well so you can see that people are, I mean customers are really looking for new specialized, you know, approach towards, uh, you know, partners that will really bring them to the next level because they went through some difficult time or some not but what they have is that they really need a reliable partner and there is more towards innovation that is needed than before. And I will say in terms of innovation, machine translation now, it’s not anymore, it’s not enough, if you see what I mean. And that’s why I think that you know now it’s the next level towards the circle system, towards what you can bring not only there but ready to positioning the company inside overall ecosystem.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Christophe, as we have reached the end of this conversation, but obviously we have to continue talking about this in the future, please share a few words to our industry about what they should do to place the customer and their focus and the center of their business.

 

Christophe Djaouani

Yeah, like I, I mean like I say, I think, you know, think always about the customer. I mean, you know, enjoy speaking with the customer. Do not be scared or afraid to speak with the customer and you know you are knowledgeable. You have the experience. Let’s engage, I think it’s important to engage, but more importantly listen to your customer. And I will say that this is, if I have a final word, it’s really about listening to the customer.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Well, with that, uh, I will have to say that this was a very fascinating conversation about customer centricity, and once again I had the pleasure to hear from you about your thoughts and experiences, there was so much to learn from you, Christophe. I’m sure people listening also found a lot of useful ideas that they can apply to their work. They have a lot of thinking to do. I want to thank you and look forward to our next conversation soon.

 

Christophe Djaouani

Well, I hope we will have one more, but before we close again, I would like to thank you for the invitation and thanking you as well for all the positive impact you’re having in our industry on different level as well and looking forward for our next chat. But thank you very much, Sultan.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Appreciate it. Thank you!

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

OK, it’s time for my roundup of the interview and my analysis as to what has been discussed. Customer focus and centricity forms the basis of relationship based enterprise businesses. Lots of us take our relationship with our customers for granted and don’t invest enough which results in transactional, easily replaceable vendors and non meaningful business connections. As Christophe pointed out, customers should be at the heart of everything we do and we must design our business model with the customer and their needs in mind. Equally important is engaging with the customer and ensuring continuous open communication to be agile and respond to their changing needs. It takes a certain way of thinking to build a customer focused organization and the thought leadership must be part of the company vision in an LSP. To achieve a fully customer focused business model, LSPs must also understand and learn about the human element which revolves around the desires of the customer organization and their style of business. If you solve the customers problem they will stick around and ask for more of your solution if they have a continuous need, it’s a simple as that.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That was my conversation with Christophe Djaouani on the topic of customer centricity. He’s a smart leader who has made significant strides in span of less than a year building one of the fastest growing language services organizations in the world. I hope you were able to learn from this conversation and apply these action items to your business.

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Until next time!

 

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