COUNTING THE COST OF LOST BUSINESS
Businesses in Thailand are losing out because of an inability to handle simple English language customer service enquiries.
I've known this for a while but this worrying fact has been highlighted again in recent days within the hotel sector. I needed some information confirmed by four Bangkok hotels and without exception these four hotels have failed to answer my emails. Even subsequent follow-up phone calls were not able to resolve what were simple questions that any potential guest might ask.
My own BusinessWeek Thailand magazine recently highlighted the case of a Thai company that had potentially lost business worth upwards of 25 million baht because of a failure to deal with English language communications from a British business. The lost business to these hotels isn't in the same league but if they're constantly unable to handle communications from potential clients the value will soon add up.
It's true to say that many businesses and hotels do have good English communication skills however there's a significant number that do not, and the cost to Thailand in terms of lost business is adding up.
8 comments:
It is quite surprising that even hotels cannot answer English emails, as these should be used to international customers. But it fits with my experiences, whenever I sent emails with questions on topics around my blog to Thai authorities it seemed like a sending them to a black hole. I was planning to write a rant on this myself.
Andy. Thanks for your comments.
I think the whole issue of getting official comment for blogs is interesting in itself.
I don't think the majority of Thai organisations take this form of the media (yes, blogs are media in my view) seriously, yet arguably they have the potential to be more influential or cause more damage (depending on the article) than the so-called mainstream media.
One of the drawbacks of Thailands non-colonial history is that it has an aversion to any form of seeming dependence upon foreign knowledge.
I have often wondered why Malaysia and even Indonesia have been more successful than Thailand at attracting Western investment, the answer lies with the seeming inability of Thailand to cater to the language and cultural needs involved with Western investment.
We had some good balancing comments in the magazine story, including the fact that those contacting Thai companies from overseas need to have more of an understanding of the way things happen here, including an understand that most Thai people (a huge generalisation I know, and apologies if anyone is offended) are not confident with English communications.
But as I discovered with the UK company, those that DO make the effort are rewarded. That company opted to sign a contract with different company, and the one they initially tried to deal with lost out big time.
It's ironic that Gartner now ranks Thailand as being among the Top 30 off-shore service providers last year, however the two areas where significant improvement is required are English language proficiency and IT skills.
Both of these issues standout in the hotel, tourism, telecoms and banking industries, in which simple customer email enquiries in English are left unanswered or ignored.
... and as if timed to coincide with by post, Grant Thornton's latest report today shows Thai businesses are placing English language skills development as a significantly lower priority than at the same time last year.
I agree with everything that Leosia, David and Andy have said.
Even in the business to business arena, Thais are known for not answering emails (in English).
Catherine, Thanks for your comment.
I've seen it so many times, both personally and professionally. Do you think it's totally a Thai problem or do you think that we (non-Thais) need to be more understanding and adapt our approaches accordingly?
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