Relationship-building is critical for your business success. One simple method to gain your clients’ and prospects’ trust is to offer them a little glimpse into your behind-the-scenes work.

In this post, I will tell you how we did it. You may say that we could have done it better, but at the time we were pretty satisfied with the outcome, which was not more clients or orders coming our way, still...

Our translation business was slowly but surely picking up. The ten-plus translators working regularly for us were kept busy and were never complaining. We all worked hard and made nice money.

There was a group of another thirty people waiting outside for the next job. Unfortunately, we did not have much to offer them: they were working with languages that were used less frequently by our clients or their professional background was insufficient. For instance, Japanese was very seldom requested but when it was, the translator was also expected to have pharmaceutical education and background.

What could we do?

Just as we were celebrating the birthday of two colleagues, remembering funny and true stories of translation glitches, it struck me as a good moment to share with our clients. Thanks to our tight quality control system, these mistakes were usually noticed before the drafts got approved, and we had a good laugh, and that was it. So, it was not too risky to let our clients learn about them.

Let’s give them a little insight! Let them enjoy those moments and laughs with us! – That was the idea.

So, when we prepared our next weekly newsletter for our clients, we promised to add an extra item every time and share with them these funnies.

I still remember the first one because it was my own baby, so to speak. I was working on an American detective story that had a scene taking place in a quad (i.e. prison). The timing was right before Christmas and those guys behind bars were complaining about going cold turkey. I had never heard the expression before and did not know that it meant the suffering of addicts who were abruptly and completely deprived of drugs, so I thought those prisoners were unhappy about their traditional Christmas meal served cold. When I understood my mistake, we had a cheerful moment with my colleague doing the proofreading. Fortunately, he was good not only at French but was familiar with addiction issues as well.

The funny anecdotes at the end of weekly newsletters were a hit with our clients, and in a month, people started talking about them, so we got the attention and some appreciation of our clients. More importantly, we started to seem like people to our clients, not just an impersonal translation company. You’ll want your clientele to relate to you. I think you’ll discover that your clientele finds it much easier to relate to people than to an abstract business entity.

This was not directly bringing more bread to the table, but we were told that sharing these moments meant that we were confident our proofreaders did a good job. Which they certainly did.

So, our clients’ trust was growing, and later so did our business.

Have you ever let your customers see what is going on in your workplace? Tell us in your comment, please.