7 minute read
In the Trenches
How to Communicate
With Customers Speaking Another Language
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By Allen McBroom
If you attended Sunday school as a child, at some point you probably learned the story of the Tower of Babel. The gist of the story was that mankind had gotten kind of pompous and decided to build a tower so tall it would reach Heaven. God took notice and knocked down the tower. Just as icing on the cake, God also confused the tongues of those involved, and suddenly everyone was speaking a different language. Bedlam ensued, and people scattered to be with folks who spoke their own language.
It must have been pretty tough to be in business right after the tower fell. Just imagine, you’ve got a stall in the local market there in Babel, selling imported maize cakes and exotic roots, and suddenly all your business is conducted by pointing and shaking your head up and down, or wagging it left to right. The previously reliable shared language is no longer all that helpful. That must have been very frustrating, especially when handling returns or discussing the price of a quart of honey.
Our store exists in sort of a modern-day Babel environment, and maybe your store does, too. We have a major university a couple of miles east of us, and the international students often come here to browse. Many of our string rental students have Mandarin or Korean as their first language. Many of our guitar and keyboard customers speak Spanish or some other language as their primary tongue. Since we are a predominantly agricultural area sort of close to our southern border, we also have a lot of Spanish-only-speaking workers who visit the store on a regular basis.
As the only employee of the store with some command of Spanish, I’m usually asked by other employees to work with the Spanish speakers. Since I also speak a little Korean and Mandarin (translation: I can say “hello” and “thank you” without causing an international incident), I’m called to the forefront every time we have a customer who speaks those languages. My only real skill is my patience, and usually, between my limited vocabulary in their language, their limited vocabulary in English, and a lot of pointing, we manage to swap products for money.
If you often have customers who speak a variety of languages in your store, you’re likely familiar with the scenarios I described above. If the customers at your store don’t currently speak a variety of languages, that will likely change sooner rather than later.
For some time, I’ve been using Google Translate (translate.google.com) on my phone to communicate better with international speakers. I type what I want to say, Google translates my text to their language, and they type in their reply. It’s cumbersome, but it works pretty well. (By “pretty well,” I mean when I say, “I’m sorry, but I have to charge tax,” it doesn’t come out as, “I’d like to date your red umbrella.”) It’s also free, which helps.
If you’d like to better serve international speakers in your store without typing every sentence into Google Translate (or without hiring a team of United Nations translators), rejoice! Google has recently upgraded its translation capabilities to some exponential degree. Now, you can go to the app store on your smartphone (both Apple and Android) and download the Google Translate app. Once installed, you’ll need to play with the app a bit; it’s not complicated, but it does require a little exploration to find the settings you really want.
Here are the basics of what the Google Translate app can do for you. You tell it your language (for me, English is as close as I can get; there is no setting for Southern), and the language of the other speaker (let’s say they speak Italian). Translate now gives you a screen, written in Italian, that says something along the lines of “Hi, I am going to use my phone to translate my words into Italian, and yours into English. If that’s okay, we’ll get started.” You show the screen to the other person, and when they nod agreement, you press the “Conversation” button.
There are two ways for the Conversation feature to work, and you’ll have to pick one or the other.
In the first method, you pick English, and speak. The phone hears you, and then repeats what you said in Italian. The Italian speaker presses the Italian button, responds to you, and the phone repeats whatever they just said in English. (As far as I know, you have no control over the voice that translates what you’ve said, so when I’m being translated, a European female sort of voice comes out of the phone.)
The second method is a button in the middle marked “Auto.” That works just the way you’d expect. If the phone hears Italian, it repeats what it heard in English, and vice versa. If there are only two people in the room, that seems to work pretty well. If there are a lot of voices, you might want to use the first method instead.
The Google Translate app covers pretty much all major languages, and it’s being upgraded as Google’s progress develops. There are other apps in the app store that can also translate conversations. One really good one costs $3 per week per phone, which totals over $150 each year. Putting that app on every employee phone could cost you some real money. But using Google’s free app, every employee can have their own, personal translator on hand at no cost to you. Oh, and as a bonus, the app will work without a cell signal connection.
I’m pretty happy to have this app at my team’s disposal, since I am no longer the only person with the skills required to serve customers who don’t speak English well, or who struggle to find the right words in our complicated language. I’m expecting it to lower not only my anxiety level, but also the level of stress our customers have trying to function in a place where nobody speaks their native tongue. I’ve seen the faces of international customers light up when I greet them or thank them in their own language, and some have told me how welcome they feel knowing someone is trying to meet them where they live (so to speak). I think once they leave the store, they probably look at each other and have a good laugh over my accent — but that’s OK, too. Anything that makes them glad they came in to my store is a good thing.
Here’s my advice: Get the Google Translate app. Have every employee in the store install it on their phones. Make sure they know how to use it, and you can start mining sales from populations who have been previously hard to reach because of linguistic barriers.
If you don’t want to fool with translation apps, if it’s too much trouble or you don’t see the value in it, be aware that your competitor down the road may be using one. If you want to keep every dollar you can, get the app, and you’ll be better prepared to serve any customer that may come through your doors.
Happy trails.
