Word360 Is the ATC’s Member of the Month

The ATC’s Member of the Month in January 2022 is Word360, Midlands-based language service company heavily involved in the provision of translation and interpreting services for the public sector.

We caught up with Chief Commercial Officer and co-owner of Word360, Kavita Parmar, the driving force behind Word360’s continued growth.

Building on pre-pandemic development, Word360’s proprietary tech enabled the company to pivot quickly into 2020 and tackle the challenges brought on by the pandemic. “I think it’s fair to say that 2021 was a game-changer for us in terms of cementing ourselves as an end-to-end tech-enabled business,” Kavita summarises.

Word360’s Wordskii platform and technology is developed completely in-house.

“We made a decision early on to build our own technology, which is quite unusual for a small business like ours. We wanted to build a service that incorporated all areas of interpreting and translation. Wordskii incorporates booking management with our own secure video and telephone interpreting services. It has allowed us to automate a lot of processes that were always done manually within the industry before,” says Kavita.

With a functioning interpreting platform, Word360 was able to move public sector clients to remote services with relative ease, making sure they could continue to offer accessible services to their users despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic.

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard in my life! We have trebled in size in the last 18 months, but building and scaling the platform technology has also enabled us to recruit, and look after our people,” continues Kavita.

Year 2021 also brought Word360’s team well-deserved recognition for their work.

At the NHS in the Midlands Excellence in Supply Awards, the team picked up both the Patient Experience Award and the Small Business Award. And at the West Midlands Tech Awards 2021, Word360 grabbed the Tech Collaboration Award.

“These awards were an affirmation of the work we do,” says Kavita. “Customer service underpins everything we do, and we are passionate about growing the business sustainably with the customer in focus.”

Over the past two years, Word360 has seen the phenomenal digital transformation the public sector has gone through, with the need to adopt alternative ways of communicating driving operational improvement and the delivery of remote services.

“That digital transformation is here to stay,” Kavita confirms. “One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic is public services opening up to the opportunity to choose how services are delivered.”

“Face-to-face interpreting is still there, and needed, but public sector authorities are now much more focused on what’s right for the patient or service user, and choosing the right mode of delivery, whether it’s face-to-face, telephone or remote video interpreting. Every organisation is different, with a different vision and operations, so we need to work in partnership with our clients to contribute to and challenge the notion of what interpreting services can offer.”

For the 30-strong Word360 team, 2022 will be about scaling up for growth, adapting services to client needs, sustainably.