Customer Development Beyond the Value Proposition: Which of Your Clients’ Challenges Should Become Your Changes?

Max Morkovkin 00:05
And I think it's a good time for the first presentation we have today by Uganda agri deskah, and 3d on Portugal live, from ego translating. So while we're waiting for our presenters to join, I would like to remind you about these nice tradition that we have with ebook giveaway. And after every presentation, we'll announce it and someone will take a chance to win it. You've gained really on will choose the best question and give this book to you. I think today, what you gain is prepared is the month test by you I first thought my first thought was come on man test. How is it connected with business and localization? But then I get to know that actually these you ganja Radeon, thank you for joining us. How are you today?

Rodion Pochekaev 01:11
Can't get any better. Thanks very much for having us. We're really really excited. You know, SME analogy again, it's fun. She's a VP. She's always fine. And me. I'm totally nervous. After all this, you know, legendary Fox here is just iconic. I can think think of a better word really to describe it. So it's a great honor. Thanks very much for having us to be excited and nervous. That's how we

Max Morkovkin 01:34
don't want to we have a very nice audience. Hello.

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 01:37
Hello, can you hear me? Well, I see. Okay, when I started him,

Max Morkovkin 01:43
we can hear you well, and we can see all these great certificates you have on the wall?

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 01:47
Yes. And while Raian is keeping the traditional follow up from home and he's from home and office here. His work is my home. I should stay here from morning till night. So yes, these are all our clients indicates. So talk about customer development. So ready to start if you're good.

Rodion Pochekaev 02:15
We're certified enough. Now. Um, let's see if I can share the screen

Max Morkovkin 02:22
given the mic to you and you will show or you will see my face again when it's a q&a session time. All right. So

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 02:31
awareness, the sun, usually you are with sun on your back. Now it's more gray.

Rodion Pochekaev 02:42
Okay I have to I believe I have to restart. I'm sorry. But just the system wants me to restart the Google Chrome so that I can share the screen

Max Morkovkin 03:05
okay, no worries. It's just live broadcasting, no recordings, everything happening as you see it. So you'll get here. Maybe you can tell us a bit how the things that go in at eager translating.

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 03:21
Yeah, I would tell for sure. Um, so today we are going to talk about customer development, because we have done a lot during class two years. And that's partially because of pandemic circumstances because we had opportunities to deep insight into client, Tim, and I think people here in the participants would agree the first month but then we have more chances to go into detail for line format. customers and partners are more flexible when talking online can bring forward more well some details, which was not obvious when you are meeting face to face. The well you are easier to come to meet anybody across the world. Because while the instances are the limits could be overcome very well. So I think this year's this year on the hall for was wow Our product development. And that's the key reason why we decided to put on air today this topic about customer development and value proposition which we go after deep insights into our customer needs and so on. So things are good could be better for sure. Much better and we put Great Expectations into our you new plans and new products and new services, which we are going to talk about. If Rodian Woods finally could join. I don't

Max Morkovkin 05:46
get it. Yeah, yeah, we can see

Rodion Pochekaev 05:48
you. We can hear you and I'm about to start sharing the screen. So prepare. Sounds exciting.

Max Morkovkin 05:53
Okay.

Rodion Pochekaev 05:54
Okay. Oh, my God, what is that? Okay, and what about the keynote? Not I'm gonna see. What's going on? Yeah.

Max Morkovkin 06:15
So John, just to confirm that I can see it. Yeah. Now it's in presenting mode. Cool.

Rodion Pochekaev 06:22
All right, finally, let's get started. Okay. So, again, I would like to say another introduction.

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 06:31
Yes, the intro not to take too much time. So we are two together, I am responsible for handling technologies and technologies is always driven by their customer and demand. And Radeon is totally responsible for customer clients development, etc. So I've mentioned about our way of translating company, please. Next slide. And well, today were both very great days. First reason is that we're here to work from home for all three conferences and very thankful organizers and smartcards brilliant organization. All 33 conferences before, this is the first reason why I'm happy very much today. And other one is that on 27th of May 31 years ago, our company egg processing company was founded. Yes, it's our birthday today. And another birthday is happening today. It's St. Petersburg, Russian large city. It was founded by Peter the Great in well, 318 years ago. So three points three reasons to be happy today. Well, we quite large language service providers in terms of Russia were among the top five Russian language service providers. We have good good expertize in many industries, and managing more than 200 employees in different regions of Russia and worldwide, and owning our own software developments and software IT solutions. So if your words now about customers ready on your stage,

Rodion Pochekaev 08:35
yeah, there you have it. So you can see from the slide that we've got mostly oil and gas, energy and heavy industry, guys, those are customers. Those are number one winners, that I got to mention. And that's a great like an honor, again, to work with champions. And we were mostly concentrating on large like global or nationwide projects that involve a lot of technical translations with all that already takes like translation memory, machine translation, machine translation, post editing, these sort of things. So we can see we also have some retailers on Monday leading like industries of our clients. That's just for you to know what kind of customers we're dealing with. Now that we have said a couple of words about the company and its customers, it's time to get to the third ingredient. That's the strongest one customer development as a an approach or practice whatever you call it, it's pretty painless. So we're pretty sure that most of you guys know about it, but do you really because we still kind of discuss this method in the LSB industry. Is it really as common? You guys know what it means? Do you apply it on it on a regular basis? Please post that in the chat. Now, but as you do a not as familiar as closely as I are familiar with the approach or any anyway, it's worth repetitions, it's actually about your cross functional team, that is necessarily got some sales reps marketing and product management involved. It has it comes up with an idea. And if they just want to check it, get it approved, validated through the customer communication is most general. And once it gets validated, you come up with market hits. That's it. That's the basic or basic essence of customer development. So we have gotten sort of a week inconsistent of three major stages, before we actually decided to implement the concept. And the stages are as follows.

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 10:51
Yeah, early on people writing that something is bad with your voice. And it's a bit too far away. Well, but take now, that My Word, so thank you, yes, the first stage was no customer development at all. And like radio said, we'll be doing pretty good with large clients, big projects, well, super detailed technical translation projects. And we just could not see the reason to change our extensive growth strategy. Our goal was to sell as much translation services, both translation and interpreting as we could. And our processes were simulated to scale our successful practice and approach, who would seem to fail it was formation when there is no obvious limit to extend to the road, right? So no, cause therefore, thank you, we are doing fine with all what we are. But then things began to change. And I believe most of the present here No, and went through this way. We have noticed that our clients are evolving really like the market itself. So we had to follow their demand, we and other language service providers produced the products and services just to remain useful just to remain with their demand needs. And I guess so we see on the slide just Well, our vision and our approach to providing the services and products tailored to the needs of customers at different stages. But stay there, because we were already engaged in customers reality, but kept being reactive, actively, but still reactive, which is, I believe, right approach.

Rodion Pochekaev 13:03
I think yes, that's right, the right way to describe that stage. Can you hear me now by the way? All right, thank you. So yeah, there was a brief as Deaf stage, but I was already a huge team, because we picked up some technology as opposed to zero technology at level one, stage one, and we decided to keep our eye on a customer. So that's a good starting point from which we jump right into stage number three, we're actually customer development comes into our life, and it all starts with the idea of another back to school episode about customer potential, the idea that you come up with and you then you analyze the market evaluated and assess, how good is it for your idea, how is he going to get in it and this is like at first glance, and the idea of customer development is that you always get a better a better idea a better product or business model that is going to feed the market better with every iteration and then you go and try to identify your target audiences issue. So you got another hypothesis of what is wrong with your target audience, what is the problem is trying to solve and you go hunting for insights, that's where the actual communication goes. It begins and goes in circles actually, and your target issue, target audience issue hypotheses is getting more and more like crystal crystallizes. Then you get back to market evaluation and assessment. How big is the market for your idea of your project and what's the commercial potential and then you decide to concentrate on the V V problem actually, that is worth concentrated on because your target audience is issue it may be A complex like consists of several problems. So you choose the one that you want to help the customer find with, and you got your value proposition, you propose the most efficient, the most helpful, useful way to solve the problem. And then goes the MTV like the minimal value product that is not good enough to be like put on the supermarket shelf. But it's already good enough to deal with the problem that you have identified, and you try it and finally get into the most harmonic and like profitable point, which is product market fit, which everybody's aiming and aiming for those things that I think they're more like a mathematical kind of thing. Economy scales, let's leave it to Ghana, and get to another exciting. I think, actually the most exciting thing in terms of the discovery that we have done through customer development, which is the new market shape, what is it, it's actually can be described with one most important word, which is more the customer needs more now, more data, more data formats, more quality, because once you get like dependent on the system that is consuming data, of course, you obviously get dependent on the quality of that data. And team roles, it need all those guys who can deal with different aspects of data quality management, so you're ready to 14 growth. Now, we say that we know that but how do we know? Okay, those are good old fashioned ways that we thought about actually just communicating to our clients in a different in every possible way. And thanks to Corona, and by the way, people became more eager to chat online, so there's more information online. And so it even made it easier for us. Now, once we decided to implement this customer development approach, it means that the client is the center of the universe, we put it into the very center of focus. And very, now, what you have to do when your client or the client is number one world champion, well, what you try to do is you try to grow up to meet his expectations, and the components of growth.

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 17:30
Exactly, to be the champion together, along with your customers. So and we defined and went through the three major things to improve. So first of all, the team, we started with those who was on board, yeah, and we inspired involved. During the year, we even led a gaming activities, competition activities, to do involve team to go through agile and technological approach. So one should guide your current team and spy and pick up the best from your customer site as well. So learn from the customer. We had technical partners, who would we could outsource and some people we had to hire for sure. But the team was somehow created to go forward to well go along, new customer demands, then shift for sure goes processes. Just keep your eye on your customer, those guys know how to do the business. And once you go to jail, you won't believe he used to be wonderful. It just makes no sense. And number three, for sure, you will have to embrace technology, no matter how it scares you, your management, your colleagues, your team. So we chose the way to invest to invest both in house development. But there are a lot a lot of open source solutions, which we just needed to learn. So the big three here to be along with championship of your customer is processes, teams and technologists. And now we are coming to the most interesting part two real life stories. Each of them is quite special. And that was the starting point for new product development new approach. First one well, and it was the current client, large productive enterprise with constant translation demand and we have noticed that they weren't happy with with The result in terms of volumes and quality. So after coz def way approach, we realize that the only way to get better was to deal with they're available available TM and TB databases, and apply those tools that we once developed for ourselves, and help them to improve translation productivity and language data quality. So that was the first time when we validated our natural language processing toolkit, or commercial potential. So we sold it to our client and used it in house. And another reason yours one, yeah.

Rodion Pochekaev 20:49
Yeah, I really loved the way that in the first case, as a result, we had, on the one hand, our clients satisfied, but on the other hand, our commercial benefit, that's a good combination. And actually, I think it's pretty much what the customer development is all about. Now, case number two. I can talk about it for hours, but I will try not to. And the truth is that I was really involved in this case, it all began from with, with a incoming request of a new client, which appeared to be international IT development, or a developer, I'm sorry, and they wanted us to record a large void corpus, but I think the Russian innovator, but before the narrator for 15,000, sentences, voice corpus chosen, they wanted us to give them 20 narrated, each one of them records 50 identical sentences. And then, based on the quality assessment of this material, they select the ultimate one, the ultimate winner, who's going to record these large corpus so well, that the technical requirements were like 20 pages of small font. And it's pretty confusing. But we were for information, we do multimedia localization, so we partner with like, talk Russian students, and we check one of them and they say no problem at all. 20 in our interest and your time, so we're gonna we're in by signing the contract with the International it developer. And that's when the real fun begins, the studio says, okay, generators told us that they need a slide control provision, just let the client arrive there, there's going to be limited use within a certain project. Nothing other than that, say like a tourist guide, digital tourists like me voice voice guides, something like that. They want it to be like a navigation digital tours navigation system. Do I have to say that the client has no way no limitation and limited use, including resetting. So the scenario is that okay, then it's going to be five times the money and the contract is already signed. And that's when we begin, like always shuttling between all the parties involved in our clients between narrator's and their interests. And between the studio as the like, technical process, executor will learn plenty new things, how to be a voice coach, how to manage voice, data quality, how to how narrated like voice only goes down in price after a huge set of exclusive rights have been set and stuff like that. So there's no better way I think, to learn about things than to look from different points of view and have sort of like a three dimensional picture of it. So the as a profit, we know about voice prompts recording about voice that recording, you need voice purpose, we can do that. That's pretty satisfying for us. Again, number three is

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 24:03
absolutely a personal achievement to go through that. And the third comes just after the previous they're ready for about a speech synthesis and that was also from our current telecom client which had AI lab and they had the need for multilingual chatbot data. So we went through through different stages which were absolutely unknown for us before like data processing, for extraction and designing chatbot scenarios, speech recognition, dialects clustering, sentiment analysis, etc. And we had to use our personal proprietary platform, natural language processing toolkits, open source API's. Sell solutions together without causing COVID crowdsourcing some of stages. But happily, when you very well, they're part of speech synthesis. And we're ready, both to localize this is different language in different scenario combinations. So that was another one.

Rodion Pochekaev 25:33
Yeah, and you can see how it works like Jace one, you try one thing taste to try another thing tastes really combination of the three. And those are just three cases where we have a lot more. So as a result, what used to be traditional LSP company became a kind of a certified AI, company, data provider, that sort of thing.

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 25:57
Yeah, I'm just summarizing that summarizing, yes. So, considering our so called medical history, our customer relations experience, we took four major steps, as a traditional video, get as big as you can extend some of them. And if you're good, you'll get rewarded with some extensive success. And then if you're already best and have enough budget and resources, you're starting r&d part and exploring along with customer experience. And we looked around us and international escape how a master's in the language industries is going it's we recruit, we make our team bigger. And there was set the stage for sure, for IT solutions both applied for better quality of translation and localization and for our current needs. And he of the customer development approach. And looking and digging into the customer needs, we came close to natural language processing potential. So and that was possible because we gave an opportunity to our clients share their experience and ask us about for for this help. At this stage, we had to put spin off model to build absolutely new approach and beauty within our organization, because it's still quite bureaucratic, large and rigid in different processes. So we don't know what stage they called, but our customers will lead us to the space to the stars. And I believe for the at least the most interesting way. So yeah, and

Max Morkovkin 28:09
to keep up with the schedule, we need to start q&a session in one minute. I think so just one minute for you. Okay,

Rodion Pochekaev 28:17
yeah, speeding up, I guess you can call it a concept sheet from translation, project management to Data Quality Management, that's what we wanted to pay attention to, which is important discovery for us. And actually, we're about to finalize, and, you know, all the things said like technology, productivity, return of investments, etc. They do matter, but it's all about partnership. And as language guys are here to help the customer in a cope with a language slash cultural barriers, while they build the landscape of tomorrow, every single moment of today. And when they require you to be a partner in a slightly different manner, please dare to be such that's what we appeal to, you know, and customer development is a is an instruction of how to keep your hands, you know, occupied, or alone your body as you dive into the void of unknown. This is unpredictable, but it's such a dive. And the biggest reward that you get is your partner partners deal. Like consider your partner's partnership efficient enough. So dare to be their partner your partner wants to do. That's what we appeal to. Thanks very much for your time. Now, if you've got some questions, we'll be happy to answer them. Thanks.

Max Morkovkin 29:31
Yeah, there are questions. Just to remind that we have EBO giveaway for the best question. You've Ghanian rhodium will choose. So

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 29:42
can you see the chart? Yeah, I just see only greetings and congratulations on our

Max Morkovkin 29:54
I have credits.

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 29:56
You should put on any question because We prepare the Good Book, which would be pleasant to get as a gift from smart cat, actually,

Max Morkovkin 30:08
of course, of course.

Rodion Pochekaev 30:09
Not good to be here again, because all I was seeing was this presentation, I felt a kind of blind.

Max Morkovkin 30:18
Let me help to read these questions for you. Can you hear me? Yep, yeah. Okay, good. How do you handle it when your client has requirements that involve internal investments due to technical development? Do you go all in right away? Or do you do a return of investment analysis first?

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 30:40
Well, we just dive inside the request, we are grabbing this request from the moment. And then that's the approach which is luckily shared by our management and by how well, the steak learn from our customer request. And there were three cases mentioned. They were both in terms of job and in terms of investments. So we had an opportunity to try try different options. And we are lucky to have. So

Rodion Pochekaev 31:38
we do I'm sorry, again, of course, we do the calculations, and we try to reduce the cost where we can and we try to try to encourage our customer to invest in in the technologies that involves because it normally it's profitable for both sides, once you are really interested in something big, the customer is interested in investment because it's going to be returned with a reward. So yes, we do both. But as it comes to the case that it generates about Yes, this is so so exciting that we jumped right in sometimes.

Max Morkovkin 32:11
Okay, okay, good, then let's take a look on the second question. It's about case two, and it's from Nanning Sri voice corpus for speech thing that sentence is how to check the accuracy or the occurrences the accuracy well, how do you check the accuracy and appearances? appearances?

Rodion Pochekaev 32:42
Accuracy, well, this is a technical requirement is such in software program that is used to check the current set of like void data. So you can like from different different tools are applied.

Max Morkovkin 33:00
Okay, okay. Let's give him a chance to get with your question. Again, I do want to add something

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 33:08
a part of what mentioned their success there was that Rajan who was leading that project was very close, both to client and to our technical supplier. So it was very easy to get the very feedback just just now, immediately.

Max Morkovkin 33:33
Kudos to Rodya. Okay, so the next question from Cade apart from bespoke service, what do you think is the most important factor to consider when choosing a solution for a client? Would you put the priority on budget innovation or maybe something else?

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 33:52
Their best priority would be the quality we could provide. Because if we realize and we had such, unfortunately, cases that we won't be able to provide the quality required, we would reject as the first speaker to the questions only if we understand that our technological readiness or solutions available are not sufficient for the quality required at the project. And this is possible to get only after very detailed briefing with client. So for all new product service, you can have the briefing only in this case, we understand that yeah, we are we are ready to go through it. And we are ready to find the new solutions, new technology. So the qualities that I believe are crucial, crucial factor

Max Morkovkin 35:01
Okay, you're getting a return just to remind you that you will need to choose the winner to give a book. So we have two more questions one from Lisa Vita what percentage of your team had to build up NLP expertise to work out the third case did the project requires special training for your translators?

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 35:24
We applied some crowdsourcing activities for sure this stage but last year when we started well you have translators well, people who could be ready for NLP tasks and if we talk about in house team 90% of them was involved in the project some learned outsourcing tools, some redevelop our appropriately once and that is responsible for sure for recruiting for recruiting specialists required for the project. So special training for sure, but we learned very good practice when we started training our post editors for machine translation technologies. We had like a school for machine for post editing translators and so we have such an experience and that was quite easy to restructure those those approach to then use specific to then use skills.

Max Morkovkin 37:06
Okay, and the last question before we let you choose the winner, please try to answer it as short as possible question from Seoul okay. What are some of the most common mistakes when doing customer development?

Rodion Pochekaev 37:22
I think the biggest one is asking the wrong questions like would you like to have fine translation quality would you love us to come up with a product that is going to satisfy the need like something that has already got some imply you know that the that provokes the customer answer in the way that is going to lead you to some mistake and then you take that as a as a face and that is a false fact, which is the biggest and actually the book where we are going to soon choose Davina is going to get it. It's all about the right question asking the right questions, so that the customer development doesn't lead you nowhere.

Max Morkovkin 38:07
Okay, so we had five questions first one from the knees. Then you had question from Nanning tree than from Kate Elisabetta and the last round from the last one from so okay. You're getting everybody on?

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 38:23
My part is going to question about voice corpus, because we will have to discuss it as we did it understand the details and questions are always that suppose so

Rodion Pochekaev 38:42
I guess it's going to be a rock paper scissors situation because I like the one factors influencing the solution choice, but you get it. Of course the choice is yours. Okay, thanks for low score,

Eugenia Gorodetskaya 39:01
speech synthesis.

Max Morkovkin 39:03
Okay, congrats to Nanak. And your Ganja rhodian. Thank you very much for a nice presentation.

Rodion Pochekaev 39:10
Thank you very much.

Max Morkovkin 39:11
We hope you enjoyed it. Looking forward to see your networking