Presented by: Clyde W. Anderson Director, Marketing & Sales LLE Language Services
It’s a simple axiom -
If you can’t communicate in the customer’s language, you can’t do business.
Global market forces in production, distribution and price are putting pressure upon the traditional supply chain: offices and distribution points in other countries. Thus, the Internet is the most attractive alternative.
When reaching out to the world, you cannot just create a web site with the attitude, “if we build it they will come.” Sure they will come, but how will they buy? You must first plan, develop and implement the internal infrastructure to handle inquiries and sales from all over the world. Incorporating language requirements and cultural nuances is absolutely necessary.
Large companies may think they have brand and name recognition, thus they are secure in their market. Not so. Consumers will buy from the company that communicates with them in their language with cultural sensitivity. For large, medium or small organizations brand and name recognition must be translated to the language and culture of the people. The ability to answer inquiries quickly and efficiently, close sales, effectively respond to customer service issues and to build / maintain loyalty and trust in-language is necessary to participate in global commerce.
To attain global reach, organizations should view the entire enterprise when seeking language support. Organizations often establish language services for one business unit, such as sales or customer service, while ignoring, or choose not to apply, language services to each point of prospect or customer contact.
In analyzing corporate language requirements, we have found many instances where companies have translated their web site and done a great job. However, they failed to build a language infrastructure to handle the volume of inquiries or sales that come pouring into the organization by non-English speakers around the world: telephone calls, e-mail, letters, facsimiles, etc… They have invested huge amounts of money in the appropriate marketing vehicle but failed to properly address the response of potential buyers.
Thus, it is crucial to implement language support at every communication point accessible by a prospect or customer: Internet (web site), telephone, e-mail,
documents, voice mail, digital audio files, web chat, announcements/messages (IVR/VRU) and language proficiency testing of multi-lingual personnel.
In assessing language needs for the enterprise, a comprehensive language services audit is required:
1) identify the communication points within the enterprise
2) determine the amount of language traffic at each communication point
3) analyze the type of language traffic received
4) assess the language needs of each communication point
5) plan the supporting language infrastructure
6) deploy the appropriate language service to quickly and effectively respond to the prospect or customer language need.
Begin your internal language assessment with reviewing your on-demand, or real-time, language requirements (telephone interpretation, e-mail translation, web chat translation and online proficiency testing) followed by the more passive language needs (web site translation, document translation, voice mail / digital audio transcription and recorded announcement/messages).
Any business or organization already on the web has worldwide visibility. By ignoring millions in your audience by not addressing their linguistic and cultural preferences you could even be going as far as to insult them. You may be missing out on entire market segments.
We often hear “all our buyers speak English.” That may be true, however, it is shortsighted. For example, almost everyone in Holland and Sweden speaks English, but studies show they prefer to review marketing materials, negotiate sales, sign contracts and obtain customer service in their native languages. It’s a fact. How many of you English-only speakers would buy a product or service when the transaction would take place in a language other than English or in broken English? What would be your comfort level?
I encourage you to study how your organization sells and services from a non-English point of view. The many benefits you will derive in revenue generation, customer service and brand loyalty will pleasantly surprise you.