Partner agencies

At a glance

• Partner agencies are other language service providers you work with to fulfill appointments.
• You can assign a partner agency to an appointment when you don’t have an available interpreter on your own roster.
• Every appointment still requires an interpreter name — you’ll add external interpreters associated with the partner agency.

What is a partner agency?

In the interpreting industry, it’s common to partner with other language service providers to cover requests your own team can’t handle. Fluent lets you manage these relationships so you can assign partner agencies to appointments and keep track of the details you need for scheduling, billing, and communication.

Adding a partner agency

Go to Team → Partner Agencies and click + to add a new partner agency. You can fill in as much or as little as you need:

• Agency name and legal entity
• Website
• Partnership start date — regardless of when you added them to Fluent
• Address (street, city, state, zip)
• Service region notes
• Languages offered
• Services offered — in-person, phone, video, or any combination
• Preferred scheduling method — useful if the agency isn’t on Fluent and prefers to be contacted by phone or email
• Profile picture — for example, their logo
• Contacts — primary contact, billing contact, and scheduling contact

External interpreters

Every appointment in Fluent requires an interpreter name, even when the appointment is handled by a partner agency. Since partner agency interpreters aren’t managed by you, Fluent treats them as external interpreters — you just need their first name, last name, and language.

You can add external interpreters in two ways:

From the partner agency profile — Open the partner agency, go to the External Interpreters tab, and add interpreters there.

On the fly during assignment — When assigning an appointment, type the interpreter’s name into the interpreter field. Fluent will recognize interpreters you’ve added before. If it’s a new name, you can add them to the partner agency right from the appointment modal.

Assigning a partner agency to an appointment

When creating or editing an appointment, select the partner agency from the agency field dropdown, then enter the interpreter’s name in the interpreter field.

If the partner agency has a Fluent account — they’ll receive the appointment request in Fluent and can assign an interpreter on their end.

If the partner agency is not on Fluent — they won’t receive notifications through the app. You’ll need to communicate with them directly (phone, email, etc.) based on their preferred scheduling method, and add the assigned interpreter’s name to the appointment yourself.