I’ve visited several large companies over the past 2-3 months and I’ve been struck that many of these companies are missing and opportunity to expand market share and grow revenue. For many companies, addressing limited English speakers is something they just have to do because of regulation and language access is really not part of their corporate strategy.
The opportunity is twofold:
1) Expanding by addressing limited English speakers in North America - The US Census American Community Survey (2010) estimates the population over the age of 5 who speak a language other than English at home is almost 60 million people, and according to the Pew Research Center in 2010 more than 22 million people in the US over the age of 18 had very limited English skills.
2) Expanding into new countries – there are nearly 7,000 languages spoken in the world.
An example is companies providing language access in retail branches and stores. More than just placing dual handset phones or headsets into retail branches to serve non-English speakers, this must be done as a complete package that includes in-store materials, training for the staff, promotion to the target communities to tell them about language availability. Also, these companies are using census data, Language Line tracking data and mapping this data to the branch location to make sure that the language offering is matched to the community. You’ll be amazed at the number of customers in each community who are not dealing with you because of the language barrier and once they experience the great service, the word spreads quickly in the community and we’ve seen some impressive growth.
More examples to follow…
Tags: Interpretation, Language, Marketings, Multicultural, Translation
