Chapter 21

 It’s a Worldly Thing

The year was 1962. Back before man walked on the moon. Before fat-free ice cream. Even before we knew we had to have a cell phone, and a desktop, laptop, and palmtop computer, and a subscription to America Online (or risk social isolation).

Because personal computers hadn’t been invented yet.

Well, way back in those dark days, a pretty serious guy up in Canada named Marshall McLuhan was writing essays and books that no one really understood. But everyone was sure they were brilliant. He said a few profound, memorable things—including “the medium is the message.” And he said that with TVs and other electronic communication devices spreading like dandelions in May, the world was fast becoming a “global village.”

The Amazing Shrinking World

If you’ve ever taken a trans-oceanic flight for many long, cramped hours, you know the world is still physically a big place. But McLuhan grasped an important truth those many years ago. Technology has shrunk the barriers to communicating—and doing business—across time and space. Now, just as easily as your customers can be in Sylvania (OH), or Sedalia (MO), they can be in Scandinavia, Somalia, or Slovenia!

And your suppliers might be there, too. Walk through a grocery store. You can find orange juice from Brazil, apples from New Zealand, raspberries from Guatemala, coffee from Africa, jams from England, wine from Italy, Chile, or Romania. Look at the labels in your closet. You may well find items made in Mexico, Bangladesh, Honduras, China, India, maybe even the United States of America.

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 Tales from the Real World
American companies are renowned for their marketing prowess. To them, paraphrasing Shakespeare, all the world’s a market. Don recalls, with mixed feelings of pride and disappointment, his first foray outside the United States. He drove through a tunnel connecting Detroit, Michigan with Windsor, Ontario. What mysterious delights awaited him in this foreign land? He got a hint with the first rays of sun that glared onto his windshield once clear of the tunnel. There, glaring down from the Canadian side of the border’s customs and immigration station was a huge, red and white billboard for . . . Kentucky Fried Chicken.

 

Likewise, much more recently, while crossing into post-war Croatia, once cleared through the customs and immigration checkpoint, he and his local clients entered the country passing a large, red and yellow billboard for . . . McDonald’s.

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We’re All Connected

The developed world is now blanketed by cell phones, fax machines, and express delivery services. And then there’s the Internet, which makes it possible to travel “around the world in 80-nanoseconds.” We discuss using this modern marvel much more fully in Chapter 25.

The point is this: Your market can be as big as the Earth, and your customers any one of its people.

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 Tales from the Real World
The barriers to trade between nations once included distance, language, and currency.

 

High speed travel and data lines have effectively reduced distance—it’s much cheaper to e-mail or fax correspondence abroad than to have it physically delivered.

 

English has become the common tongue of commerce.

 

And currency, while not yet universal, is easily bypassed by credit cards. Or easily exchanged—at globally connected automatic teller machines, ATMs.

 

Just for the heck of it, while traveling on business, Don has made ATM withdrawals in the local currency in various countries. Using his regular ATM card, he has gotten cash-to-go in such places as a gift shop in London, a baggage claim in Paris, and in the shadow of a thousand-year-old castle in a quaint Italian town square—complete with stone fountain and cobbled streets.

 

Global village indeed!

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Serving Citizens of the World

Because the United States is so large, you could easily spend your entire life traveling extensively and never leave its borders. But when you do leave the good old U.S. of A.—or interact with people who’ve never been anywhere near it—you realize that the whole world is not a mere annex of our familiar Land of the Free and Pizza Hut. Here are some things you should consider when setting up to serve your customers outside North America.

Toll-Free Isn’t Barrier-Free

In North America, 800 and 888 numbers are everywhere. But they don’t work from everywhere. Make sure your ads, newsletters, invoices, and other printed customer communications provide a way for people outside the toll-free calling area to reach you.

Ron was traveling in the U.S. when he received a message from a colleague regarding an interested prospect in Canada looking to book him for a speech. Ron called the prospect in Canada and was put through to voice mail to leave a message. Inadvertently, Ron left his toll-free number for the prospect to call back on. After waiting for three days and not hearing from the prospect, Ron called to find out what was going on. It turned out the prospect tried calling Ron but was unable to reach him on his toll-free number from Canada.

If you have a toll-free number, call your long distance carrier and see if it can be accessed from outside the U.S.

Fax Over Phones

Many customers abroad prefer to do business by fax or e-mail. While many of your customers outside North America may speak English, they may be hesitant to call for assistance. They may have difficulty understanding English spoken over the phone, or may be self-conscious about speaking a language they don’t use very often to a disembodied stranger.

By using written communication, they can compose their thoughts and take all the time they need to construct their questions—and read your answers—in English.

Fax and e-mail communications also involve less hassle—and time—than dealing with international postage delivery.

Be Mindful of Time Zone Differences

Your customer may be many, many hours removed from your local time. When answering calls from abroad you may want to avoid answering the phone with “Good morning,” when it’s nighttime where your caller is. Keep a time zone chart (found in many atlases and some computer programs) handy. Confirm dates and times for all follow-up phone appointments (is your tomorrow their yesterday?). Ask when your customer would like to receive fax transmissions from you.

Observe Differences in Holidays

The fourth of July is just another day to most people in the world. But the fifth of May is as important to Mexicans as our Independence Day is to us. Every nation has its own holidays—and holy days—and they very well might not coincide with ours—not even Christmas, which the Eastern Orthodox church celebrates on a day different than Western Christians. In Arab countries, Friday is their weekly holy day.

Obtain a list of the special days for the countries in which you have customers. Keep a master calendar. Don’t offend your customers by calling on, or trying to set-up a phone appointment for, those days.

Set Policies for International Customers

Despite the improvements that come with our modern age, there still are at least a few hassles in doing business internationally—for both you and your customer. Reduce for your customer as many of the uncertainties and complexities as you can. The more you fail to disclose at the front-end, the more hassle you have to contend with later.

Here are some questions to consider and clarify for your nondomestic customers:

• Do you require a Letter of Credit (LC)? Most companies will ask for a letter of credit from foreign customers. This is a draft the customer draws up with his bank outlining issues such as payment terms, shipping terms, and pricing.
• Do you expect payment in advance or will you bill customers abroad?
• If you bill foreign customers, when do you expect payment before considering them in arrears? Is this policy more tolerant than the one for your domestic customers?
• Do you accept international money orders?
• Must funds be in U.S. dollars?
• Must payments be drawn on a U.S. bank?
• If you accept payments in foreign currency, which currencies do you accept, and at what exchange rate?
• If you require money to be wired to your bank, how does the customer obtain the necessary information?
• Do you make these and all your other conditions and policies clear in your offer to sell?
• Do you build the value added tax, customs fees, or other applicable tariffs into your order forms?
• What documentation does your customer need to serve as proof of purchase for their tax records? Will your sales form suffice? Might you need to supply your customer abroad with an invoice or statement your domestic customers don’t require?
• What are your shipping terms for international shipments? FOB (Freight on Board) means the shipper pays the shipping costs. CIF (Cost of Insurance and Freight) means the buyer pays the shipping costs.

As we pointed out earlier in the book, customers place a value on your product or service that may be different from how you normally view it. A customer abroad may be perfectly willing to wait weeks for a boat to bring your goods to their country. Or they may be willing to pay more for air delivery. Or much more for express delivery.

Don’t assume. Identify the related costs and give your customers the option to spend their money in accord with their needs and values.

Communication and Cultural Issues

The biggest hurdle in doing business internationally and serving customers abroad with service they’ll find pleasing is not overcoming the barriers of time and space. It is the barrier of culture and communication.

Special Language Units

Earlier in the book we discussed special teams in the customer service function to serve your special customers. You might consider hiring multilingual staff for dealing with customers in their native language. If you have a large enough customer base that justifies the expense, you could establish special phone numbers dedicated to receiving calls from customers in particular countries or customers who speak a common language (for example, Spanish or Chinese).

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 Tales from the Real World
Besides the words being used, there might be other language differences you need to be aware of. Ron was invited to speak in Brazil a few times over the last couple of years. On his first trip, he was warned that it takes approximately 30 percent more words in the Portuguese dialect spoken in Brazil as it does to communicate the same sentence in English. Ron, being a fast talker from New York, really had to slow down his rate of speech. Fellow speakers suggested that he speak in sound bites. Keeping this in mind, his programs were successful and the translators managed to keep up with him, although they had to be compensated with battle pay.

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It’s All in the Translation

If you need to conduct an important transaction with a customer who speaks no English, but don’t have anyone on your staff who speaks the customer’s tongue, you have some options. You can hire a commercial service for interpretation (spoken words) and translation (written words). If none are available locally, try your local university or college language department. Even if no one there can assist directly, they likely can point you in the right direction for help.

When you hire someone to interpret an in-person or video/phone conference, try to meet with the consultant in advance of your important meeting. Give them a chance to become familiar with your industry and company’s terms of art, as well as the business issues you intend to discuss. The more they understand before the meeting, the less chance for misunderstandings during it.

If you’re conducting the conversation by phone, you can obtain interpretation services from the major phone companies. AT&T, for example, is equipped to translate some 140 languages (Amharic to Yiddish).

Bilingual or Not?

If you deal with customers in their native language, make sure you do it well. Someone who has taken one of those crash courses in a language, or listened to a cassette tape-based language course, or taken two years of high school instruction in a language, or who happens to own a handheld translation computer, is not bilingual!

Likewise, be sensitive to the tongue your customers actually speak. Spanish spoken by Spaniards is different than that spoken by Mexicans or Chileans.

Also beware that someone who has had extensive schooling in a language but no exposure to the culture may well miss a customer’s cultural cues and nuances. Spoken communication is more than merely decoding the literal meaning of words.

Welcoming Not Casual

Americans tend to be much more casual in business interactions than people elsewhere in the world. We think it’s genuinely friendly to call Robert Smythe Bob rather than Mr. Smythe. Many cultures around the world don’t see it that way. If it’s not Senora Rodriguez, or Mr. Hamaguchi-san, it may be offensive.

When dealing with customers abroad, adopt an attitude of respectful gratitude for their business, and one that is more formal than you would likely use when dealing in the U.S.:

• Use Mr. or Ms., not first names.
• Speak and write with the elevated language of diplomacy. Rather than, “Thanks for your business!” it’s, “We are honored to serve you, and very much appreciate your confidence in our firm.”
• Speak slowly. Your customer may have great command of English, but he or she is still mentally translating, and may be dealing with unfamiliar terms that your company or industry consider familiar. Over the telephone or video conference, your customer must contend with a slight delay from the physical transmission winding its way around the globe, plus being many time zones removed—where they may be getting quite sleepy while you’re still perky.

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   At Your Service
  Some of your customers abroad who are hip to American TV shows see them in their native country long after they’ve gone off the air here. You may have customers who want to show their familiarity with U.S. culture by mentioning shows such as Three’s Company, Dallas, or Kojak. Just say, “Oh, yes. I haven’t seen that one in a while.”

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• Avoid slang and colloquialisms (regional phrases). So no yo!, whoa, or way to go. Other examples of phrases likely to be lost on—or even offensive to—your customers abroad include: “How y’all doin’?” “Cool!” “Sorry, but that dog won’t hunt,” “What’s up?” “Awesome,” and so on.
• Avoid humor. You don’t need to be deadly serious. But given language and cultural differences, and the generally sterile nature of telephone conversations across great distances, you risk great misinterpretation of your attempts at humor. Your customer abroad may think you are frivolous, rude, and disrespectful. If your customer jokes a bit, great, feel free to loosen up a tad. Otherwise, it’s buttoned-down and businesslike.
• Competence with a smile is universal. Respect, helpfulness, and courtesy are valued and appreciated the world over. Please and thank you are welcome in any language. Pleasant, polite civility always translates well.
• Hold back on the chit-chat unless your customer engages in it first. Even when your customer initiates small talk, remember, your cultural perspective and your customer’s may be very different. For example, it is popular in the States to be openly cynical about politicians. That is not universal the world over. In some cultures, political office holders are held in very high esteem; some are viewed as gods on earth.
• Given the above guidelines, be yourself. Some customers abroad are very eager to practice their English and discuss popular Western culture. If they sense you are a warm, welcoming person, they may well engage you in discussing the latest movies, pop songs, or political issue. Take your cue from your customer and respond in kind. Two humans who want to communicate with each other tend to do just fine.

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 Tales from the Real World
When Don was preparing for a European speaking assignment, he spoke with some colleagues who shared horror stories of inadvertently offending their audiences by doing something Americans don’t even blink an eye at: the speaker removing his suit jacket.

 

Armed with that warning, Don began presenting in Italy at a public seminar all buttoned up. At the lunch break, the local host told Don the audience was thoroughly enjoying the information, getting all the humor, and finding the high energy presentation quite refreshing. Don asked about the possibility of removing his jacket in the warm meeting room during the afternoon session. “Sure, no problem,” his host assured him.

 

After working up a good sweat during an interim question and answer session, Don asked the audience if anyone would be offended if he removed his jacket. To smiles and approving nods, he shed the wool jacket, and found no adverse reaction from his audience. But, just in case, he kept the shirt sleeves rolled down. No one walked out. The end-of-day reviews were extremely positive. And Don was invited back by the client.

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How Can I Offend Thee? Let Me Count the Ways . . .

Much of the world watches the movies and TV shows made in the U.S., and increasingly all the world’s citizens buy the same name-brand consumer products. However, there are still many distinct cultural differences between Buffalo, Tokyo, Morocco, Mexico, and Jericho (Israel, or Long Island, NY).

All symbolic communication—words, gestures, colors—take on different meanings depending on where on our globe you stand. Death is symbolized in black in the U.S., but in Japan it’s the exact opposite: white.

There are many ways to inadvertently offend someone with a different cultural orientation than your own. To serve your customers with the kind of service that keeps them coming back to your company, you need to be mindful of cultural issues.

Your customer abroad may speak better English than you do. He or she may be up on the latest U.S. politics and movies. But that doesn’t remove him or her from their native culture. And that’s the filter your service will run through.

Language

You might think that simply trying to speak your customer’s language, even though you aren’t very good at it, will score you points. You might be assuming very incorrectly. While some may find your attempt quaint and amusing, others may take great offense at hearing their beloved tongue mangled—even by someone who’s doing it in an attempt to “reach out.” The French, for example, tend not to appreciate poorly spoken French. And they detest boorish Americans who become indignant when they encounter French people who do not speak English. The nerve!

You may be better off speaking English slowly and carefully than stumbling through a language you really aren’t prepared to speak. Your customer will be both embarrassed and confused for your well-intending but inappropriate efforts.

Gaffes can occur even when the translation is flawless, or your customers speak fluent English. A couple of examples.

• We know of one company that wanted to tout its “collaborative” style of customer service. What could be wrong with that? Well, to a North American, collaborative may equate with teamwork, partnership, and so on. But to some Europeans, the word collaborative produces a dreaded echo. During World War II traitors collaborated with the enemy.

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   Tales from the Real World
  Sitting on a plane, the gentlemen next to Ron asked what he did for a living. Ron answered that he helped organizations dominate their markets and get closer to the people they serve. The gentlemen, with his British accent, paused, and then said that was illegal in Europe. Confused, Ron asked what was illegal. The gentleman responded that companies in Europe cannot openly use the word dominate in their literature. It smacks against the spirit of fighting monopolies. This example proves that sometimes the words we use in this country may be perceived as having different meanings and levels of intensity in other cultures. You may want to check with your foreign colleagues to see if any words or gestures you are using will offend anyone.

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• Casual or slang words that aren’t offensive here might be considered rude to fellow English speakers over there. Example: Fanny. To folks in the U.S., that’s casual speech for one’s seat. To someone in the U.K., it means a part of feminine anatomy that’s not spoken of in polite company. Likewise a Brit may speak of fags and mean cigarettes . . .

Don’t risk offending your valued customers in other lands. Foul-ups in spoken or printed communications risks offending customers permanently (yet another Instant of Absolute Judgment).

Invest in getting qualified assistance. There are consultants who specialize in “inter-cultural,” “multi-cultural,” or “cross-cultural” communication. If you need assistance locating such experts, contact the Institute of Management Consultants, listed in Appendix A, “Resources.”

Written Communication

Have your material that’s written in a foreign language typed up by someone whose native tongue is that foreign language.

There are many classic stories about well-intending professionals who were competently bilingual but missed some subtlety in the translation. To everyone’s embarrassment, they unknowingly declared to the locals product benefits in catchy, but slightly off-the-mark phrases along the lines of “Won’t give your mother warts,” “Cows think it’s delicious,” or “Best when used naked.”

Chevrolet found its Nova model a tough sell in Spanish speaking countries where the words no va literally translate to no go.

Unintended Slights

The world’s customs and habits are full of gestures that mean “You’re great!” in one culture, and something quite offensive in another. Just crossing your legs a certain way, waving a certain way, standing too close or too far away . . . all these hold the potential for insulting your customer when no insult is intended.

One European asked Don during a seminar break why the Americans had such an annoying habit in their restaurants—the one where the food server keeps returning to the table to ask if everything was okay. “The interruptions aren’t okay!” he declared.

So you see, even trying to assure customer satisfaction can irritate or offend someone not accustomed to the practice.

We suggest you develop a deep understanding of the cultures in the lands where you do business abroad. Several excellent books are available in your bookstore covering the subject of doing business internationally. Get some. Heed their advice. Be mindful of your customers’ customs and taboos.