As the shared language service provider for the EU agencies and other EU bodies and institutions, the Translation Centre has always paid particular attention to ensuring the high quality of its products and meeting its stakeholders’ requirements. With this aim in mind, since 2001, the Centre has had a free after-sales service in place. This was originally based on the Client Satisfaction Form (CSF) which allowed clients to express their satisfaction and submit feedback on the language services provided by the Centre, including requests for fully revised documents.

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As the shared language service provider for the EU agencies and other EU bodies and institutions, the Translation Centre has always paid particular attention to ensuring the high quality of its products and meeting its stakeholders’ requirements. With this aim in mind, since 2001, the Centre has had a free after-sales service in place. This was originally based on the Client Satisfaction Form (CSF) which allowed clients to express their satisfaction and submit feedback on the language services provided by the Centre, including requests for fully revised documents. Following on from that, in 2011, the Centre launched its Client Portal, specifically developed to facilitate operational activities with clients. This is when the CSF was converted into an online form which could be accessed securely by clients’ in-house and national competent authority experts. Since then, an impressive total of 21792 CSFs have been successfully processed by the Centre in close cooperation with its clients. With the introduction of its workflow management system, eCdT, in 2016, which integrates the Client Portal, the Centre began looking at its processes for measuring client satisfaction and handling client feedback. The objective was to optimise the current system taking account of the latest trends in the field of feedback and evaluation services, technological advances and clients’ ideas and observations collected throughout the years. After a detailed review, the Centre decided to embark on a project with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) aimed at developing a new solution which would separate measuring client satisfaction from handling client feedback. As a result of this project, from 28 August 2020 onwards, an enhanced after-sales system, based on the Corrected Version Request (CVR) and fully integrated in eCdT, will become available to both clients and the Centre’s staff, covering the needs of all actors involved in the workflow. The main purpose of the CVR is for clients to ask the Centre to review the feedback submitted by their in-house or national subject matter experts on linguistic output delivered by the Centre, and to provide them with an updated version. Measuring client satisfaction will henceforth primarily take place through regular surveys linked to clients’ operational data to help them assess the service quality offered by the Centre. The new CVR fully embedded in the production workflow and the regular client satisfaction surveys will remain cornerstones of the Centre’s quality assurance system, which aims to provide sustained and reliable high quality over time in line with our clients’ needs and expectations.