I've been managing sign language interpreting agencies for 30 years and I'm here to tell you, like all businesses, an interpreting agency should be tracking both financial metrics and performance metrics. Those measurements represent the basic health of the company.

For operations, the front-line coordinators at agencies filling requests for onsite and remote language interpreters for the Deaf have one single metric they need to be concerned about: fill rate.

Fill rate defined

Fill rate is the number of hours serviced divided by the number of hours requested, expressed as a percentage. If you fill 800 hours of interpreting, but clients had requested 1,000 hours, your fill rate is 80.0%.

Why fill rate
Fill rate is the most important numbers for several reasons.

Firstly, every request that goes unfilled is a Deaf person that lacks accommodation. That truth should be acknowledged by every single employee at the company: coordinator, manager, executive. A single missed request is not just a number. It's someone's college mid-term, job interview, cancer diagnosis. I'd consider anything less than a 95% fill rate to be a failure.

Secondly, fill rate directly drives customer satisfaction and reputation. The client actually ordering the service (who is rarely the Deaf person themselves) isn't going to use your service again if you fail at the basic agreement of providing language access.

Finally, it is strongly correlated with the key financial metric of gross revenue. You can't bill for a job that you couldn't fill.

But what about the money?

It's managers, not the front-line coordinators, who negotiate rates with clients and interpreters. Managers who set policies on travel and cancellations. Managers who get feedback on the financials.

I've had to train coordinators to stop getting hung up on the cost of an interpreter versus the price being charged. and to encourage them to independently approve travel time. A coordinator's focus should be on putting a qualified interpreter on a request. That's it. And when an interpreter asks for something against policy, our actual policy is to agree to get the interpreter there.

Using Fill Rate

Fill rate can be sliced and diced many ways. It can be compared year over year, month over month, by client, or by client coordinator. Start measuring now since a single snapshot in time is not as valuable as seeing that number change.

Fill rate the most valuable tool to measure coordinator performance. Get measuring today!