Smartcat for Freelancers - Overview and Q&A

Jean-Luc Saillard 00:00 Go ahead Colman Murphy 00:11 Hey, good morning, good afternoon or good evening. This is Coleman Murphy. I'm on the marketing team at SmartCAT. And thank you for joining our webinar today. We're just going to take a few more minutes to give people that time to join. But before we do that, before we get into it, let me introduce John Luke sciart. He's going to be our our main lead today, as we go through the presentation. John Luke has been with SmartCAT for many years and has deep deep knowledge and working with many of you directly and certainly the Freelancer community as a whole. So we wanted to make sure that we're here to support you answer your questions, let you know what's coming up. So that's why Sean Lucas here we will also have participation from our product development team for more technical questions. And Oksana also on the marketing team is here to make sure that we capture any input and if we can't get your question live, and we will answer those questions via email and also in the community channel after this webinar. So I see people are still joining us, we will, we'll just stay in holding mode for another moment or two. But I'm going to bring up the slides will be mostly silent for about another 30 to 60 seconds, and I'll reintroduce myself and then we'll get this going Thank you. Again, for those of you joining, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. Again, our apologies for the challenges that we had last week. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with Zoom. So the webinar was not able to advance. As you probably experienced, you are not able to connect, but it looks like things are going well today, I see people are still joining. So we're just going to take another moment or two to give people a chance to connect and get ready. As a housekeeping rule, if you wouldn't mind, keep your stay on mute. And if you do you have questions, please use the q&a function, enter your questions there. And that will help us manage the queue of questions. And also after the webinar, we can directly address all of those questions back at you through the SmartCAT community as well as email. So we're just going to take one few more moments there. People are still coming in and then we'll get going. And John Luke is going to lead us in that. Jean-Luc Saillard 03:50 Okay, so that one person had an issue with sound but it seems to be resolved in so Colman Murphy 03:55 Okay, good. I can definitely speak louder. But for sure I know John Luke has a strong voice that will carry so that's from that's what comes from many years of of leading up our customer success team communicates wrongly. Also on the on the panel today we have we have representation from our product team. So if you've got more technical questions, we will be able to address those as well. And Oksana is making sure that we keep track of all all inbound questions. So again, if you would use that q&a function to enter questions, and you can do that at any time. We've already captured quite a few before this webinars as well as the previous one. So we definitely have a list of questions that you have asked us that we can dig into but feel free to add more. Think is John Luke, we can just about get going. Do you want to take over presentation or would you like me to advance the slides for you. Jean-Luc Saillard 05:01 It's up to you, Coleman, we can advance this, you can advance the slide, it's fine, you know. So, Colman Murphy 05:06 all right, here we go. So as I mentioned, our our goal today is multifaceted. But we're really want to put this under the umbrella of you are our most important community. This is this is the engine that drives our business and keeps our customers and your customers happy and successful. So how we develop the product and how we develop it specifically for you. And address your concerns is really important to us. So this is the first of hopefully, many of these webinars that you will continue to see from us. And we are internally expanding our focus on providing support to the Freelancer community. Today, we're really going to look back on the last six months or so of development to talk about what's new. Amongst those we know there was an issue a couple of weeks ago with the changes that we made to the rating system. We have I believe addressed all of those issues. But we want to make sure we take time today to talk about that. And then as I said, this is for you. So we've we want to hear from you want to hear how the product is working for you today and what new capabilities you'd like us to add. All right. So John, Luke, you want to take it over from here. Jean-Luc Saillard 06:32 So there are some of the topics that we want to address. And what we've added to the product recently is an option for prepayment. And we'll expand on those on those topics in the future and pages to become to come up. So the prepayment option we have for marketplace jobs feature that has been requested also by a lot of translators in the past is the ability to reuse your transition memories, some changes we made into the payment page, if you get paid through SmartCAT, we also want to introduce to you what we've done also for our customers with the new autopilot program, this could also drive a lot more work in toward the marketplace. So for you guys, and also what we've made, what the changes we've made to the profiles that you have on your, on the marketplace and the Reading System, as Coleman mentioned, you know, we've made some changes. And we I think rolled back to this changes and making some additional changes, you know, so this is something that's going to be important for you moving forward. And just as a reminder, we also have, we still have this customer referral program, you know, when we offer $500, for people who make a referral, we can give you more details about that, you know, but now we have that back again, you know, so. So the first topic, we want to discuss this prepayment. And the reason we've done that is that it's clear that with the marketplace, if you take a job on the marketplace, you you will get paid, we guarantee payment, you know, so even if the customer doesn't pay us, you know, we will still pay you, you know, so this is absolutely clear, we want to make sure that you understand that, if you take a job on the marketplace, you will always get paid. What we found, though, is that, in some cases, you know, some customers, you know, they take longer to make the payments, you know, sometimes we have to chase them, you know, you might have to communicate with them as well, you know, so we wanted to find a solution to this problem is going to help us it is also going to help you, you know, the first thing that we demand that we resolve is that we want you to get paid faster, you know, so even though as I mentioned, we guarantee payments, you know, sometimes it's going to take longer than than usual because we have to talk to the try to find a solution with the customer, you know, get some information from you. So with this prepayment solution where we want to do is we're going to definitely improve your cash flow, you're gonna get paid, you know, faster, you know, every single time you take a job on the marketplace, we also want to streamline the process on our side, you know, so not having to chase you know, the customers on our side or your side, you know, so once the job is completed, you know, the payment task can be generated. And what we really want to do is also like, you know, we want our marketplace freelancers to feel that that they are that they are in the in the driver's seat when it comes to talking to customers that might be on responsive, you know, so it's, I'm sure that's happened to some of you, you get a job from the marketplace, and then you try to connect with the customer and you don't get an answer from them. They become unresponsive. You don't know when the payment is going to be made. Even though like I said we guarantee the payments but you don't get any answer from the customer. So we want to not be in that situation you know, so we want you to feel more comfortable accepting job in the marketplace and without having to worry about You know, dealing with those non responsive customers. For us, obviously, there isn't a, there's a big advantage that we eliminate. Companies will come in the marketplace and, you know, with maybe some, I would say, Not perfect intentions, you know, hire people in the marketplace, and not make a payment, you know, so this is a problem on our side, you know, every single month, you know, we make payments to freelancers, and we don't get paid, you know, from the customer. So we want to eliminate that we want to make sure that every single time there's a, there's a request on the marketplace, it's a legitimate request, you know, so that we don't face the situation where we have to chase the customers, you have to chase the customers, and it takes a long time for you to get paid. So this is the reason why we installed prepayment to begin with on the platform. So So now how does it work? You know, so the way that it's gonna work if you could, okay, perfect. So when a customer invites one of you into the for job from the marketplace, what we're going to do is we're going to estimate the fee to cover the translation know, whatever task that you made, and then we're going to ask the customer to make a payment, you know, the payment could be made in the form of a credit card, for example, and we're going to hold this amount, you know, from the customer, you know, on the on their account, you know, so once the task has been completed and approved by the customer, then this fee, you know, for the for the job, and the fee could be sometimes slightly different from the first estimate that we made, you know, then this fee is going to be paid to you to your account directly. So there's no need, again, for you to, to wait, you know, to chase after a customer to, for us to chase after the customer, you're gonna get you're gonna get paid once the task has been marked completed by the by the customer, because we already hold the payments, you know, on our site, you know, so and then if they are on the customer side, if there is any prepayment amount, you know, that's higher than, than the final fee, then this amount is credited back to the customer. If I can explain that sometimes, for example, a customer could invite a one of you from the marketplace into a project, and then this person, like, you know, we calculate an estimate. And sometimes the this person does finance with it was invited might not be available for the task, and the customer has to go to a different translator, and the fee might be different, you know, this is why at the end, you know, of the of the process, the prepayment amount could be sometimes higher than than the original estimate, you know. So this is one of the problems that we fixing also with this prepayment refund. So this is how the prepayment works. Now another feature that we've added to to the system, and I know this was requested by a lot of translators, for sure, is the ability to reuse your own translation memories in project you know, and then the way that it's going to work and comment, if you could go to the next slide, the what's going to happen is that when you receive a project right now in market, you're going to see a different option into your into the project, you're going to see an option to perform a pre translation using your own translation memory. So the benefits, I think, for you are definitely very positive. You know, I know, a lot of you have been working in this industry for a long, long time. And you have, you have your own transition memories from your own projects, that might apply to a project that you get from a customer on the marketplace. And rather than having to like you know, pretend like you know, translate, like you know, copy and paste from, from your translation memory, or just try to remember what you did, you know, then we make, we're making it much easier. And it's not that you simply receive a project, there are specific tasks. And you can simply click on this new button to pre translation using your own TM button. And what's what's market is going to do is going to take what you have in your current TM, apply it already to the to the document that you've received for translation. And then you'll see when you open the editor, you'll see not only the pre transition from the client, obviously, that's already going to be completed, but you'll see your own TM matches inside the document, you know, that's not going to affect the price that you get from, from your customers, the benefit is really on your site, you know, the customer is not going to get the benefits of your own TM, you will get that benefit on your site, you know, so you get to reuse your own work. You know, there is no loss of your previous efforts, you know, and you still going to get paid for the work that was contracted to you by the by your customer. So a lot of benefits on your site. And once again, that was a feature that was requested by a lot of translators, you know, so, so we're happy that we can finally release this feature. Now in other areas Uh, another feature that's also been requested by a lot of freelancers is that you all know that you can get paid through a smart cat, you know, so you choose your payment method, you can get paid by wires, you can get paid by PayPal, or we can provision your credit card, as you know, like, you know, the system is very convenient, we try to lower the fees as much as possible. But one of the issues that we've had in the past is that, you know, people told us, you know, I would like to be able to remember, like, you know, what I got paid, you know, for a, for a specific time period, you know, for example, when it's time to prepare, you know, tax document, you know, so in the in the past, you know, that has the disinformation has not been made very clear into your into the payment interface. So what we've done right now, is that we've created a new tab in your payment page, now, when you see a detail of all the payments that have been made to you, quickly, and you can also see the status of the payment, you know, so if some payments have not been made, you know, you can obviously, you know, remind, you know, the customer or if, with the prepayment, obviously, this, this will not become an issue anymore. But this allows you to have a bird's eye view of everything that's going on with your payments. And as I mentioned, you know, at the end of the year, you will have all the information that you need to create any tax document that you that you need, you know, so and it's also going to give you a good idea, for example, if you have some customers, you know, that payments, that they're making payments, you know, late, you know, so maybe like know, when you work with them, maybe remind them that you want the payments to be made on time, you know, so that allows you to have like, a more straightforward communication with your, with your customers, you know, so there are many benefits for you basically, one of the main benefits is not there's a history of the payments. And this also helps you with any of the paperwork that you have to do for for taxes and accounting. So that's one thing, the next thing we wanted to introduce, and this is not something that will have a direct impact with you at the moment, is that at our new autopilot program feature that we've added for our customers, you know, so and what we're trying to achieve here is that, if you have like, No, we are working with a lot of customers, who sometimes have like, a lot of work, you know, a lot of projects to manage, but might not necessarily have the human resources to manage this project themselves, you know, so we added this autopilot features and Coleman, if you can just like, you know, go to the next slide, then we can explain what autopilot is, you know, so what we do with autopilot, and this is something that's going to be not visible to you, again, is that when a customer creates a project on SmartCAT, what's going to happen is they will have the option. Now, rather than managing the projects themselves, to turn on the autopilot feature, and autopilot is going to automate part of the process, you know, the first task, you know, that a lot of people are looking for, is that to assign the different transition tasks, you know, so for example, you, you have a document that's, you know, in 10 languages, you have multiple steps, you know, you need to assign, you know, 2030 freelancers to the project, you know, not everybody, not all our customers have the resources to, to do this, this type of work, you know, so what they do in this case is simply go into SmartCAT, they create a project, and then they have like little button switch in the project page that says turn on autopilot. And you can see this little screenshot right now that says autopilot is on and working. You know, and at that time, you know, the system is going to select translators based on multiple criterias that we have, like, one of them being the ratings, you know, that that we'll discuss, you know, further in, in the webinar, and other like, you know, availability, current availability is obviously another factor. But then the system will pick translators to assign to those different tasks. And that's going to the main benefit for the for the customers is that they don't have to spend as much time managing the project, everything is going to be taken care of after the suppliers after the finances have been selected, you know, the program is going to track to make sure that the project is going to be completed on time. If there are any questions, you know, from the people assigned to the different task, you know, all this will be taken care of by the program. And also we have internally what we call co pilots that are tasked in tracking the projects once they've been started. So this is really one of the main benefits for the customers is that they will it's going to reduce their project management time is also going to reduce their costs because there's one of those customers rather than, for example, working with the language service provider, maybe they want to work directly with a freelancer for many Reasons that could be, you know that they like to work with freelancers, or maybe the the trend to reduce their costs, you know. So they can, by using autopilot, not have the burden of managing the projects and also reduce the cost of translation. And very often what they're going to find that also is that the turnaround time is going to be much faster. For those customers that are, for example, trying to replace a language service provider, working directly with a freelancer is going to make it that you remove an intermediary. So you can have faster turnaround time to contact the freelancer, the Freelancer starts to work, and then complete the job, you don't have to wait for someone to confirm the job to confirm, you know that they've received the files, assign it to someone else. So we're going to, it's going to reduce the turnaround time dramatically, we see two to three times reduction in turnaround times in smaller projects. Obviously, with larger projects, the turnaround time, benefits might not be as great but they're still quite substantial. And also, the on the on the client side is going to definitely going to eliminate all those tedious task of like, you know, on their side of like, you know, tracking the project, making sure the projects to be completed on time, answering questions are going to be taken care of, by the by our copilot team. The way that it works is, as I mentioned earlier, is that when the project is started, and the customer starts, switches on autopilot for this project, then machine learning or algorithm, you know, that we have running in the background is going to go through all the freelancers that we have in the database, you guys basically, you know, and then we're going to find freelancers that match the document that's being translated, you know, so the system actually reviews the document, that's, that's been requested for translation. And then we review the documents that you have cancelled in SmartCAT in the past, to see if there is actually a match between what you've done in the past and what the customer is requesting. And we also look at the readings, clearly, you know, like, the higher the rating, the better it is for the for the customer. And also productivity. If you put in like, for example, that you can translate, you know, 5000 words per day, or 2000 words per day, if you do post editing, for example, or 2000 words per day, and then you already have some work, you know, that's been assigned to you on SmartCAT, you might not be available to finish this project on time that we would look for someone else, you know, so we look at many factors weightings, your productivity and your availability. And then we're going to assign tasks, you know, to translate based on those different factors. So the tasks are assigned to to you as a freelancer, and then the system is going to run 24/7. And we're going to make sure that the project is going to be completed on time. And if there if there is a time when one of the copilot needs to intervene if for example, translator or the customer has a question regarding a specific cause, like in a specific segment or maybe a document, then one of the CO pilots that's on our team will intervene, go into the document answer the question as needed, coordinate with the client to get an answer to the to the translators. And making sure basically that the transition is going to be completed on time. So this is really how the autopilot system works. Now the benefit for for you as a freelancers is that we're going to get more and more people into the into the system hiring people in the marketplace is going to generate more projects into the marketplace, more chances for you to get to get jobs. But on your side, what you need to do to help us is to clearly enhance your profile, you know, so, you know, add more information to your profile, your experience, do as much transition as you can into SmartCAT. So that we can use this information to assign tasks, you know, when there is a match between the documents that you've transmitted in the past and the documents that are being requested for translation. So really, it's very important for you to add as much information as you can into your profile, so that you actually revise up into this algorithm that we use to pick translators for the auto pilot program. We also want people on the auto pilot program people that are responsive and also have good track record as far as completion because we make guarantees to the customers with this autopilot program that the project will be completed on time. So we need translators that have also a very good track record, you know, as far as completion on time completion. So now we talked about your profile, and then again, we've made some changes into the profile, the information that you could put in your profile. So this is again important that you take the time to do this. Now, as I was talking about availability. So now you can actually go on your profile, select, you know, which days are your working days, if you open for project or if you're not, if you're busy, you could, for example, be very busy with a specific project and you want to Maxi, Microsoft was busy. And if you're going to take some time off, you know, you can also indicate when you're going to have like, you know, you're going to take some vacation time. So this is also a good information that's also used by our customers and also going to be used by the autopilot program. And another thing is that I was mentioning to you the productivity is also very important in the sense that if you want to specify a service, you know, for example, we show here like translation, you know, transition costs a specific cost, but also how many words you can translate on a daily basis, because this information is actually being conveyed to our customers, you know, when they choose Chansey, to work on the project, we use this information to show the customer will this Freelancer be able to complete the task on time based on their productivity. And also, if they already have some project in progress, you know, so it's important that you take the time to fill in that information, because it's going to be visible to the customer. And they're going to make sometimes choices based on this, you know, so and then make the take the time also to add as much information, you know, for the different tasks, you know, that we've added. For example, you can see right now you can add costs for editing, proofreading, post editing, but also certified transitional. So transcreation. Those are tasks that are not in be assigned in this market platform. So if you offer two services, please take the time, you know, to do this. And clearly, you know, add, as I mentioned, add as much information to profile as you can. It's important if you have for example, a CV if you have like work experience in order to add this. Because sometimes when a customer is going to be looking for a freelancer this is going to be they're going to be looking at this what experience you have in a specific industry, you know, which type of work you've done in the past. So please take the time to really add more information into your document into your profile. In this case, common we see someone that's Danish to Japanese, I don't know how many Danish Japanese translator we have on the platform right now. Not a very common language for sure. Colman Murphy 27:20 They should get all of those jobs then. Jean-Luc Saillard 27:23 Absolutely. Exactly. So. So let's move on to the rating system updates. Okay, this is something where we have to maybe apologize a little bit about some of the things that we've made in the past, you know, so we've tried to introduce a new rating system. And I know there has been some pushback, for example, in the responsiveness rating. And we do understand, you know, pieces, clearly, this was not meant, you know, to, to create inconvenience for the for our freelancer, Mark group, you know, but this is basically, you know, what happened. So we added this responsiveness. And you can see right now on the portfolio, like, you know, responsiveness that was based on, you know, how quickly you responded to a, to a task that was assigned to you. And we've definitely got some feedback from some of you right now, we actually outlined the feedback that we got from Faustina, but we got some other feedback from other freelancers. Basically, this responsiveness reading was not well received, if we can say, No, so what we've done on our site, really, we have, we've been responding to you, we've been responsive to the responsiveness metric. And the idea here was that we have removed the responsiveness metrics from the satisfaction, the satisfaction score, you know, and then what we want to do is one definitely get more feedback from you, our community, on what we can do regarding this, this reading, and also look at more broadly at the rating system, which metrics you know matter to our clients and to you, and also how to best calculate it. This responsiveness weighting was not created, you know, in a vacuum. This was definitely based on the feedback that we had gotten from from existing customers. So we tried to implement something that would match the requirements from our customers, but also not penalized freelancers community, but clearly we did not. We did not get get a very good score on this implementation. But we definitely need to implement something. So we're gonna keep on speaking and talking to you and talking to our customers and come up with a better solution for that, you know, so, anyway, we do apologize to any of you that maybe it's been negatively impacted by this responsiveness rating, but we're going to work for moving forward, we're going to work with you and work with our customers to come up with a better system. So let's go look at the some of the changes that we made. So we have have, you always had like an overall rating, you know, that was based on a score of one to 10 with two factors take into consideration the Quality Rating, and also on time delivery. No, that has not changed, you know, so you can see over weighting is still on a scale of one to 10. You know, so with two factors take into consideration, again, the quality, and the time and time to delivery. But what we've done is that we've added some weight some weighting into each of the factors, you know, so you can see, for example, the customer satisfaction quality, we used to have like a three star system, now we have switched to a five, a five star system, and then we are now on the overall rating, weighing this quality score with 0.7 factor, you know, so that's going to be 70% of your score is going to come from your customer satisfaction, the quality, and then right now, customers, instead of a three star reading table, we switch into five star reading, which is going to give us a little bit more granularity as far as the score is concerned, you know, so, you know, sometimes you will have like, you know, three star, if you get two stars, you know, out of three, that affects your score much more than for example, four star out of five, you know, so that's going to make potentially a difference also on your score. Now, the responsiveness, as we told you that we eliminated this, you know, we, if we remove this from the from the score, for now, you know, and the last factor in the, in the, in the score is going to be the on time delivery, you know, so are you like, you know, in the, in the old days was like, Are you on time, you know, and if you're a minute late, you know, it's going to be 0%. Now, right now, we are switching to a weighing of this of this score, like you know, so rather than being like all in one, now there's going to be a weight on depending like, you know, when you actually responded and completed the task and so, so that's really the major changes right now it's going to be 30% of the score is going to be based on on your on time delivery. So your overall rating 70% quality 30% on time delivery, as opposed to right now they both had the same weight, you know, so this is the changes that we're making into the rating system. Next slide, Coleman. Colman Murphy 32:42 Sorry. Just before we leave this, I think it's also worth noting, John, Luke, the data that we have on responsiveness internally. So sometimes as a freelancer, you don't know, I might fast and slow. But our data shows that over 50% of the responses from freelancers take place within the first 30 minutes. So we just want to be clear, this is not in any way kind of a punishment or an oversight on lack of performance. In fact, what we've seen is that the Freelancer community is more responsive in terms of the the the rate of the speed of response than in house translation team. So we just wanted to be clear like this is this is not punitive. This is actually a recognition of how responsive freelancers are, and compared to in house teams, we can tell you, you are faster on your response on average than in house team. So please, please take this and this data as being, you know, more something to reflect that going forward. Jean-Luc Saillard 33:51 Thank you definitely, we do appreciate the fact that this marketplace community is extremely responsive. You know, that's definitely that was a good factor here. So now we have we come to the q&a session. We have some questions already from some of you that were submitted through a form. So we can definitely, if you have not posted some questions, we can just go over some of the questions that were posted in the forms previous to the meetings. So we have some questions here. I'm going to go through through them. Someone was asking the option to be able to see the reference document while translating on the same screen. And we now do offer a in context preview inside the editor for some formats like for example word, Google Docs, and some other formats HTML cannot be previewed directly from the editor. So that's an option that you have, we can extend this, this in context preview to other to other formats. For example, we're doing it also for video. So if you translate subtitles, you can also preview the video. At the same time, as, as you translate, you can also even see your translation as a subtitle in a video. So this is something that we offering, we're going to extend that to other format moving forward. No, but at the moment, this is what we offer to an answer to this question. Now, there's another question that will be good after all segments have been confirmed to automatically have the billable word count displayed. I'm not certain, like you know, so what we're saying is that you want the statistics to be updated in your in the task that was assigned to you, rather than simply being calculated on the customer side and the payments being displayed in your payment tab. It's a good suggestion, we'll need to think about how we implement this on our site. And Lucia was on the on the phone to product team. This is also a note for you as well, you know that this is a request from customer the ability to the for the task to be updated, after the transaction has been completed so that the Freelancer knows how much they're gonna get paid, you know, for, for the task. And so someone is asking questions, but there are some questions about getting more customers on the platform as a freelancer on the marketplace. And we think we touched on some of those issues, some of the things that you can do proactively on your site, making sure that you have, for example, a very good profile, adding as much information as you can. I mentioned in the past, if you're working directly with some customers who don't care which tool you're using, do most of your transition on SmartCAT. It's an important factor that we see activity on your accounts for the for the algorithm to find you. So those are the recommendations that would make, you know, so there's some questions from people saying that, you know, I would like to get more projects, I would like to get more clients, you know, so those are the types of things that you can do, definitely making sure that profile is up to date with as much information as you can. Another question would be great if you could save comments. So I'm assuming the what people have been asking for in the past, not just you, but also our paid customers, the ability to download the comments from the, from the editor, like if there are some comments made at some segments. Right now, we do not allow this. But this is also a very good suggestion. Moving forward, or so we're working, this is something that could be important for you, we're working on improving the chat mechanism on the platform, making it easier to have chats with different participants in the projects, because we do realize that it's not ideal at the moment. But this is something that we are also working to fix. There is also something that's interesting, I think, something that came up in the past from, from your community is the option to also wait, the customers. And this is something that we discussed internally, this is not something that's implemented. But we do understand the value of this, you know, so if you if you're working with some customers that might necessarily be I would say, easy to work with, you know, so you want to be able to offer a reading, you know, for other people in the in the community. I think we have to be also clearly very careful with this and how this is implemented. You know, so, but that's an interesting suggestion as well. So and I saw that multiple people offered this suggestion as well. Someone asked a question about how to protect you work. Just so you know, that was market, we definitely don't do not share transition memories, we do not share any data between customers between finances you know, so you work is always protected. As market is a very secure platform. We have a lot of security implemented in a system, you know, so that your data is not visible to all the people, you know, so as far as protecting your work, I think it's it's pretty safe to say that I don't see a lot of risk on the platform, you know, your work is your work, you know, it's not going to be shared with anyone else without your without your knowledge, you know, so well, so someone's asking about the payments for non SmartCAT project it is possible to to get paid for work that's been done at servicemarket You know, sometimes the customer might ask you to do like, you know, or voiceover, or some desktop publishing working with them might not necessarily be tracked in SmartCAT. But it is possible for your customers to add a payment task, they can do this manually one task at a time. Or we also give your customers the option to upload like a spreadsheet, for example, that would have a list of all the projects that you've done for them, and allow you allow them to pay you through SmartCAT. You know, so there's definitely an option that you have in in a platform to get paid for non SmartCAT project, there has to be language related, you know, so localization related, but it is possible to get paid for tasks that have not been done on smart cap. There was a question another question about and I think one of the issue with prepayment, I think is going to be is going to resolve this problem is someone mentioning that waiting months know for customers to mark the project as completed and we are addressing this issue now, not just with the prepayments also, but with like an automated way of basically closing a project after a certain amount of time with a medically so this problem should be resolved, moving forward. More questions about readings for clients. So definitely, and also escrow in automatic payments. And if I think there was a question from David, this prepayment option that we've just added, will resolve this problem for sure. Basically, this is going to be like an escrow process, you know, for the for marketplace jobs. And so someone is asking about a mobile app for accepting jobs and chatting with clients, we had actually a, I would say, a working demo of this mobile app, it's also I think, a very good suggestion, and could help you responding to jobs much faster. So this is really something that we we need to examine possibly. Now another question will be if it's possible to filter sort, on the job status page, or more filter option, the Tasks page, this is something for us to examine. Maybe, if you could provide us with some more details about what you would like to be able to sort on filter on the job status page, I would be perfect, I'm assuming that you would like to be see the you job status and be able to sort some of the columns, for example, that's something that we might need to look at. So someone's asking you about a forum, or a place to find more friends, I guess in the community, we have a community page. If you haven't tried it, you can definitely go there. You can post some questions, you can post some feedback, we're always happy to hear from from you guys. Now more questions about feedback system for clients, you know, so I think it seems to be important for a lot of you a question about the working schedule for SmartCAT like you know, so working together those markets are happening right now, I'm not suiting understand this question. What channel this market acknowledged to cash up income. I'm not sure if it's related to payments, but hopefully the new payment page is going to help this person understand like when the when the payments are going to be coming in which payments are in progress, hopefully. So someone's asking a question about pricing plans for freelance translators. SmartCAT is always free for freelance translators, you know, so they are at the moment no subscription needed to work in SmartCAT is totally free to use. And also question about using machine translation SmartCAT you can of course use machine translation is market although that's a paid service for some of the machine translation engines. And it's not that we tend to make money on machine translation engines, but we are also paying, you know, for the for the usage of machine translation. So we passing on that cost to you. A question about the paid member in SmartCAT. We do not have paid membership for Freelancer at the moment, you know, so it's free to use as I was mentioning to everybody. So at this moment, no membership, no paid membership for for translators prepay a question about prepayment. We've addressed that already and also how to view pending invoices. This is something that's being addressed. We've done that in your payment page right now you have this list of of jobs that you are pending, to be paid. I think there's also another question about attracting more clients on SmartCAT. You know, and this is, again, something we just talked about making sure that your profile is up to date has as much information as possible. So it seems to be a lot of questions about this mobile application again, no. So that's definitely something that we need to examine, regarding responding or responding to jobs seems that a mobile application could make your task easier. There's a question about invitations, or how do invitations work on the platform, if they're based on first come first serve, or if it's based on quality and experience there is. There is a possibility in the market for customers to invite translators on the first conference of basis, if you have a project that's very urgent, for example, you can assign a task to multiple translators, and the first person who accepted jobs will take the job. But the readings could also be used by customers to find translators on the platform. So you have to hire you have, you have to hide the reading you have on the platform could make a difference also, as far as being selected for some, some jobs. So someone's asking you about a certification program, I assume that some like some of you would like to, for example, be tested and be able to display the certification or the results of this test to have better chance of finding job. This is something that we've talked about in the past. But it'll be interesting to revisit this as well. There's a question. This is something we did address during the session, are freelancers guaranteed to be paid, even if the client defaults on payment? And the answer is yes, you know, so no matter what happens, you will get paid for the work that you've done. This might take a little bit of time, sometimes to try to communicate with the customer. But this prepayment process that we put in place is going to eliminate this problem in most cases. So And the final question I see here is about a global, TM database that can be integrated in all transition project, we have to be careful with this that, for example, some of our customers do not allow us to share their data with the very clear process in place very clear. mandate with some of our customers, you know that we do not share the data, you know, so this is something we have to be careful of I know there are other tools on the market, we do this. But it's market, we don't share data between customers. Not saying that this will not happen, because this could be a lot there could be a lot of benefits for finances, and also our customers, you know, so those are the questions that are have we have more questions, your comment, you can maybe go through some of the questions. I'm not sure I see all of them. Colman Murphy 47:52 I'm having a bit of a problem getting into the q&a panel. I know Oksana has been on top of the I see a few questions in chat. But Oksana, how are we doing on the q&a? Do you see any additional questions in there that are still pending? Actually, yes, there are like 16 questions in the q&a session. So John, look, are you able to see them? Or? Jean-Luc Saillard 48:17 Yep, I see them. I see them now. That's fine. Thank you. Another question from Gail. But the prepayments and understand I think your main consideration is between accepted and completed, you know, so what's going to happen, this is what's something I mentioned to you that moving forward, we're going to take steps to make sure that jobs are completed within a marked as completed by the customer within a certain amount of time, when we can release the payments, you know, so if someone uses the prepayment system for a job in the marketplace, that the customer will not be able to leave the job as open basically for months and months on end, you know, so this job would be marked as completed, and then the payment will be released to you, you know, so this is this should probably hopefully answer your questions because I know you had that was one of the consideration you had in before this meeting, you know so and also questions you have also a question about the payment page history there'll be a trace of the invoice that we sent to customers inside and outside of SmartCAT now this will be only show the payments that are being made to you through SmartCAT you know so and remember that if you're getting paid through through SmartCAT you don't need to send an invoice to your customer you know so. And gal you had a lot of questions you talked about on time delivery be less than 100% when you have always delivered on time. If you have questions about this, we definitely can review your profile to see if there are any discrepancies between your delivery and also your your waiting we can definitely look into that. You have a question? So For change when the deadline is agreed with the client, but not great in the project parameters. This is something that's a good question. Lucia will need to look into this how the how we can implement that into the system, that if a deadline has been changed after the project was created, how this could possibly affect maybe the reading for on time delivery? So we'll definitely check it check into that. There's a question from Jose here. And hello, Jose, by the way, when the clients look for linguist and sought marketplace results by recommended, I don't really understand how these recommendations are sorted. I have seen people with little translated words on the platform being way above people with more translation. So I do understand. So like when you look at recommendations on the platform, there is an algorithm that runs in the background who say it's not something that it's not something that we share, you know, necessarily with with our customers or with our community, but we can try to find maybe make it a little bit more transparent. Moving forward. It's also a good suggestion as well, because I think this could impact what you do with your profile to show up higher in the in the recommendation, you know, so question from an anonymous, how can we know the standard price for translation? Standard price, I assume that if you want to, you can put your own prices for all the different services, I'm not sure what the standard price will be compared to maybe other finances, but you fully free to pick up whatever price you want, whatever rate you want for each of the services that you offer. So how about if you like another question from Gerhart? How about you negotiate an extended deadline with a client but the client is not changes in a project? Okay, this week relates to a question from Gail, this is something we definitely will need to examine carefully to make sure that we can address this as far as the readings are concerned. Question from Alistair our user work with different time zones? Responsiveness ratings? Yes, definitely. We wanted to take into account the responsiveness rating, the different times on where you're located, this is something that's definitely reasonable, for sure, you know, so we'll definitely address this. Now, another question from another anonymous attendee, are you going to allow the option to split Join Segments in a transition files, it is already possible to do this. But project managers have the option to prevent you from joining or splitting the segments, you might want to discuss this with your project manager, you know, if they, if they, if you want them to allow you to do this, but it is already possible in the editor to split and merge segments, you know, so another question, how do you increase the clients who are working on various languages such as Swahili, if you can make what we discussed at the beginning, if you can recommend to your customers, you know, that they start using smart gadgets, that would be beneficial for you. And also obviously, for us, you know, so there's a question from Gerhart, regarding the issues that we have issue on different servers. We know that sometimes the chat might not be visible on on your chat, because you have to switch server to see the the messages, you know, so that's definitely something that we definitely going to address. Another question about the mobile app. So as I discussed, we had something about mobile app that hopefully we can maybe revisit it to see what we can do, you know, so that's, that was questions about mobile app and, and also creating the client app for freelancers that would allow transit files in the app instead of login to the boss was you talking about like the desktop app, for example? This is not something that really we looked at honestly. But anyway, is another suggestion. Question from Gearheart is the prepayment system mandatory for client is mandatory for clients that do not have a subscription with us, you know, obviously, people that might just be joining the platform just for a one time job or a couple of jobs, you know, so test for them. ppm is going to be mandatory for customers that have subscription with us, this will not be mandatory, but obviously these people already pay us you know, so that's not a an issue. So, and the question, last question from Angie, question about payment system I'd like okay, I used to have friends that I know who are doctors and professionals on a specific area that I translate is a problem if I ask them to make an account on SmartCAT so they can proofread my work before I send it to my agency. As a freelancer department that you have is you cannot assign tasks, you know, in the in projects that are being assigned Do you Tippin assigned to you and to you only the suggestions in this case might be to export, you know, this document as, for example, an extra file, and ask your colleagues you know, to work in their own market account and and bring back the extra file, after they've reviewed it, that's an option. If you want to do this, you know, in SmartCAT, you can always export the document as x live and work in a different tool if you want, you know, so this would be an option export the Excel file, asked you, friends, you know, to work into even their own market account, they can open the Excel file in their own market account, export the Excel file when they completed, and then bring it back to you. And then you will be able to report that exe file into one project. And that's all the questions I think I see for now. Colman Murphy 55:52 Wow, thank you chandeliers. That was rapid fire in the last few minutes. I just want to let everybody know that this session has been recorded, we have also captured all of your questions. So as long as you put it in the q&a, we're going to go through all of those questions afterwards. As John Luke mentioned, we've got Moshe from our product development team on the call as well. So these questions are going to the development team for them to look at and dig in deeper. And also, we're going to summarize all of the questions and answers in a document and make that available to you as well. We plan to do another one of these ideally, within the next six weeks, so we get on a cadence of always communicating with you. And at that point, I will we will also have some exciting news button, a community manager that we're adding to the team who will have direct responsibility for interacting with with the Freelancer community. So again, thank you all for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thank you for understanding your understanding that session last week, and especially John Luke, thank you so much for for that great response to all of these questions. And you have his contact information on screen if you have more. So keep them coming. Jean-Luc Saillard 57:14 Thank you very much, everybody. We look forward to having you again in future webinars for sure. Colman Murphy 57:22 All right. We'll shut it down in just a moment. Just in case somebody's typing one last question. Great. Thanks, everybody. Have a good day. Have a good evening. Bye bye.