Diversity

In recent years, legislation regarding discrimination and human rights has meant that organisations have had to engage with issues of racial and gender diversity, especially in respect of employment practices. Of course, this is to be welcomed and embraced, not only from the view of equality, but also because of the business benefits. Latterly, globalisation and economic migration is resulting in organisations needing also to engage with the complexities of diversity in their communities of customers. In many cases, engagement with diverse customer communities is being regarded as a source of economic competitive advantage. In relation to the languages of these diverse markets, native English speakers account for about 6% of the world’s population, and 75% of the world’s population do not speak English at all. Also, with developing countries fast becoming influential in the world economy, the challenge of Anglo-centric companies engaging with the non-English speaking world is upon us as never before.

Engaging with such diverse markets, in a way that enables an organisation to be responsive to customers’ needs, is complex. To achieve such engagement requires strategies that address unusually multidimensional issues in a cohesive way – cultural prejudice for example needs especially careful attention. The pervasive influence of personal prejudice is often very subtle, and can easily and inadvertently debilitate relationships that otherwise could be valuable, both from a personal and a corporate perspective. Diversity programmes that are to be successful need to include sophisticated mentoring and be fully supported by senior management – to initiate a kind of open-mindedness rarely achieved in contemporary business activities.

Increasingly, economic migration means that these issues pertain to domestic customers as well as to burgeoning international markets. The ability for an organisation’s staff and its customers to communicate with each other in their own native languages, is a key driver in successfully addressing customer diversity. The multilingual capabilities of Lattice Voice is central to such deployments, and the scripted dialogues of this approach means that an organisation can engage with millions of such customers in a way that is cost effective and which promotes best practice.