support

A business resolution for 2019…

~ paulfilkin ~ Leave a comment

There are three things that have stood out for me this year.  The first is how much support SDL have provided to their users to make sure they are able to work successfully with their investment.  The second is how little many users are aware of this, and the third is just how many users have used Trados for a decade or more and were not aware of what a support & maintenance contract can bring you.  This last one has been the biggest surprise to me as I’ve spoken to people who thought a support contract was more than the cost of the software; to people who thought it was support only and to people who didn’t know SDL provided any support at all!  So, one of my resolutions for 2019 will be to try and make sure that all our users are more aware of how to get help, even if they don’t want to purchase a support & maintenance contract.  So, I’ll cover these things:

  • Support & Maintenance Contract
  • SDL Community
  • The Customer Experience Team
  • The SDL AppStore Team
  • The SDL Marketing Team
  • Training
  • Customer Experience Program

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Out with the old…

~ paulfilkin ~ Leave a comment

… in with the new!

Although I’m not part of the core support team anymore the knowledgebase has always been something that held a particular interest for me.  When I joined SDL in 2006 we had two knowledgebase systems, each integrated into the support systems that were being used at the time.  These were Salesforce and RightNow Technologies.  The first big change I was involved in with regard to systems was moving the support teams onto one ticketing system and one knowledgebase.  We wanted Salesforce as the ticketing system as it gave good visibility into the tickets being raised to everyone at SDL because Salesforce was being used as the CRM tool of choice.  But in those days the knowledgebase component wasn’t great, so we adopted a new system.  The system we chose was Talisma.

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SDLmocha…

~ paulfilkin ~ 6 Comments

01I was playing around with livemocha.com which is a free language learning website I came across this weekend… I really like the concept where people with an interest in learning a language, or an interest in helping others learn a language, can come together in an environment where they are provided with the tools to help them satisfy their interest.  I even boosted my own score spending a little time correcting the English lessons completed by others… this also made me feel pretty good and I hope the comments were helpful; now I just need to try out the learning part myself which requires more discipline than I have been able to muster to date!!

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Product Comparisons… apples and oranges?

~ paulfilkin ~ 14 Comments

01When we want to purchase software what’s the first thing we do?  I know what I do… I look around on the internet for websites where I can learn more about the tools I’m interested in and only purchase if I can try them myself, and I imagine you’re no different.  If I want to compare TEnTs (Translation Environment Tools) it’s a small and very competitive field and you don’t see the sort of widely published comparisons you might for Office products, or desktop publishing tools for example.  So one place to start might be reviews from real users… but can you trust them?  They are often written by fans of a particular product who like to rate the comparisons based on their own personal choice, and often the comments they make about other tools are based on not knowing other tools well enough.  Certainly when you read the comments from users of the tools that came off worse you can see it’s also quite an emotive area… although it’s good to see users so passionate about their translation tools.  Even articles that are written in a well meaning and honest way, such as the one that Emma Goldsmith co-authored with David Turner (comparison between Studio and Déjà Vu) last week, can raise the hackles of some users and if you take a look at the comments you’ll see what I mean!

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