Who Should Be Interviewed?

Ideally, all employees in the company who are involved in the processes under review should always be interviewed. So, when we look at the creation of texts, we talk to authors who produce text themselves.
When we take care of the translation, we contact internal translation managers, translators or contact persons in the markets who review the texts. Therefore, it’s all about everyone who is being challenged by the process and who will work with the optimizations later on.

Nevertheless, it is important to think carefully about how many and which specific employees we should talk to. The focus must of course be on the groups of people who can give particularly much input and ideally understand of the topic. After all, what’s the use of interviewing a mechanic at the workbench if he has no idea of Writing & Co.?

In addition, years of experience and expertise quickly give us a good sense of what may be the main weaknesses in a company. When there are so many interviews, these main weaknesses are repeated quickly. Then it is just a waste of time to continue research.

What Makes Up An Interview?

An interview should be kept as efficient as possible for the interviewer and the interviewee. That is why we develop a list of questions together with the customer in advance. We have our standard question list, but it is important for us to always give each question list the individual touch of the customer scenario. Because no company is like the other, and every process analysis is different.

A few examples of questions:

• Which system/software is already being used to create, check and translate texts?
  
• What is the text editing process like in your department (languages, volumes, processing times, data handling)?
  
• How satisfied are users with the quality of the source and target texts and the editing procedures in the language processes?
  
• What is the feedback from translation service providers and users regarding the quality and editing of your texts?
  
• What do you need for a well-functioning process and what do you want from a future system environment?
  

However, the most important and central question we usually ask right at the beginning is:

Where do you have problems while working with texts?

That is namely the question about weaknesses! Of course, they also arise from the questions to the process, but every interview partner should have a chance to express their frustration in a targeted manner and list what specific improvement wishes he/she has.

How Do We Conduct Interviews?

The way we conduct interviews and, above all, evaluate them depends heavily on the number of interviews.
If there is only a handful of interviews, then we like to do this on site at the customer, – so we can get the best feeling for what preoccupies the interview partner.

Alternatively, we conduct interviews per telephone or web meeting.

And when there are really many interviews to be held, we will get our list of questions filled in writing.
However, this is only an emergency solution, because information and impressions always get lost during the written interview.

The way interviews are evaluated also depends on the number. If there are only a few interviews, we evaluate the information manually. This has the advantage that the interviewees can be completely free in the way they response. We do not have to press them into default values, drop-down lists or similar restrictions.

However, in the case of numerous interviews, we are bound to a certain degree of automation in order to keep the evaluation effort low. In addition to the usual Excel functions, there are survey tools such as SurveyMonkey or QuestionPro that enable automated evaluation. After conducting an interview, we fill in the details of the interview partner. The big drawback here is that these survey tools are mostly in the cloud and therefore not suitable for every use case.

This is how a survey might look like in MS Forms

Microsoft Forms is a wonderful alternative in Office 365 and is much more secure than one of the online tools mentioned above. It can also be used to create vivid Excel diagrams.

Some customers also have the ability to conduct a survey per their own intranet. This is of course a luxury option for us – especially when many interviews are planned.

Conclusion

The most important thing when conducting interviews is to know exactly what we want to enquire and what is relevant for the analysis. You can quickly lose yourself in the reams of information. And for every interviewee, their own problems are the most important. But before the interviews, we need to be clear in which direction our analysis should go – only that way we can focus on the really important questions and information!