Introducing Customer Portal

The idea behind Customer Portal introduced with memoQ 8.1 is for customers to have a simple and effective way to submit, track, and retrieve translation jobs. 
Translation departments in enterprises are sometimes asked to help other departments who need translation. Customer Portal could be used so that their colleagues in other departments can send them documents for translation. Similarly, a translation company could use it so that their customers can send them new translations jobs.

In this blog post, we will introduce the Customer Portal to you and bring you on a quick tour. We will be dealing with other aspects of the customer portal in future posts and webinars.

What Customer Portal is all about is making it easier for translation providers and their customers to work together. The diagram below illustrates how this works.
 

A quick tour

There are four main workflows which are used with the Customer Portal as described in the table below. As you can see the first one is the most manual of the four. However, I have decided to use that as it provides a good vehicle for our tour of the Customer Portal.

 
Let us start our tour with a customer having a document which needs translating. They log into the customer portal and select the “Request quote or translation” button.

 

The customer then must fill in some basic information about the job. 
 

The information needed includes the following:

• Source language
• Target languages
• Type of service
• Type of workflow –This allows the customer to choose a particular workflow from a list which has been set up by the project manager.
• Files for translation – They customer can also add reference files at the same time. When they select “Also upload reference files” the box for uploading files splits in two, one for uploading translation files and the other for reference files.

 

• Message to the project manager
• Note to yourself
• Requested deadline

The customer simply fills in this information and clicks on the start button.
A screen will appear stating that a quote will be prepared. The customer clicks continue. The job now appears below the heading “Quotes I need to approve”. 
 

The project manager then logs into memoQ WebTrans and will see a Tab marked Quote Requests.

Note: Only the project manager(s) assigned to this project will see the projects listed in the Quote Request tab. 
 

The project manager selects the Quote request which they want to review. They will then see the project details. 
 

The project manager can decide to accept the deadline proposed by the customer or change this. In this case, we will decide to accept the deadline.

The project manager can also choose to Delete quote, Contact customer or Create project. For our tour, we will select the Create project button. This starts the project creation wizard with most of the details from the Quote request filled in. 

 

This is the beginning of the project creation wizard. The project manager selects the project and clicks on the Next button.

In the next screen, the project manager can choose which Project Template to use and enter other detail as required by the project creation wizard. It is also possible to create the project in the desktop version of memoQ. 
 

 

The project manager can then assign a translator who can translate in memoQ or memoQ WebTrans. When this is finished, the project manager has to deliver the project back to the customer portal. They check that everything is ok and ready for delivery then simply click a button.

So far, we have shown you the project manager managing this project in memoQ WebTrans but it is possible to deliver the project in the desktop version of memoQ. The screenshot below shows the project for this tour. We delivered the project by clicking the highlighted button ‘Deliver to Customer Portal’.
 

 

The customer can then retrieve the translated document from the finished documents list. 
 

Thank you for taking the time to read this. In future posts, we will look at how project templates work with the customer portal, and how to customize it. We will also be hosting be a webinar on the Customer Portal.
 

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To try Customer Portal, get in touch with us at sales@memoq.com