GBC: our commitment to better business
We look at our commitment to the Good Business Charter accreditation and how we go beyond its requirements to run a more ethical and open business.
We believe that, whether we are working with a 500-person company or a single non-business person, Fluency should operate in a fair and modern way.
Fluency has been accredited by the Good Business Charter (#13550618). We believe that running a business, turning a profit and helping other businesses to do the same is possible with fair capitalism.
Removing the smoke and mirrors
Fluency was founded because some older language service providers have become greedy and often take advantage of people who are unfamiliar with the industry to oversell their services.
We are always happy to hear the good feedback we often receive about our pricing structure. For example, we do not charge minimum charges, we endeavour to reduce the number of chargeable words and we don't aim to make massive margins on extra services like Desktop Publishing.
We are always straightforward, and we always offer as much advice and guidance as we can with every project. We also don't hide away from services that will make us lower margins. If there is a case where a machine translation with post-editing makes more sense than a traditional translation, we offer this up directly.
Good businesses shouldn't be about profit margins first, they should be about giving a good service. That's why Fluency is successful, because as our reviews show we always aim to give the best service possible.
Fairer on our linguists and partners
Every linguist and partner that Fluency works with is a talented individual who works very hard at what they do. That's why we have internal processes to ensure we treat every linguist with the same respect and represent their work correctly.
On average, we pay 84% of linguists and partners within 15 days of delivery and the other 16% within 30 days.
Fairer on the environment
We are a paperless, technology-driven company. We worry about our carbon overheads. For example, Fluency uses only power-efficient, low-wattage computers with low-carbon footprint cloud services.
Printing is a massive waste of resources and is highly discouraged at Fluency. As of the end of October 2022, Fluency has only printed 25 pages so far, all on recycled paper.
We are trying to reduce our net carbon emissions as much as possible and plan to take further steps in 2023.
Fairer on your privacy
Why is your privacy important? Because it's yours. We're proud to have built our website in-house and to use cookieless, non-user identifiable analytics on the Fluency website. We also do not use tracking pixels in our e-mails.
We use TLS/SSL for all communication methods and we never transmit plaintext passwords. You can read a little more about some of our efforts to keep your data secure here.
Feedback
Fluency takes every bit of positive and negative feedback seriously. We welcome suggestions from everyone, even those that don't use our services. We use this feedback to refine our internal processes every quarter, removing the things that don't work and enhancing the things that do.
If you have some feedback for us or any questions, please drop us an e-mail at projects@fluencyls.com.
More to come in 2023
We're very happy with our customer feedback, and it has been a challenging time for all of us in one way or another.
We have some things in the pipeline, including outlining our commitment to open-source projects and to introducing new types of discounts for non-profits. We can't wait to tell you more next year.