How Language Testing Ensures Best Business Practices
It stands to reason that any company would want to ensure their employees are skilled communicators. In fact, many organizations need to ensure best business practices in multiple languages. For example, a hospital might need medical professionals who speak both English and Spanish. Fortunately, language testing can prove linguistic proficiency with absolute certainty. That means businesses of all sizes can ensure they’re adhering to best practices across languages and cultures.
The Business World is Multilingual
It’s safe to assume that big, global industry leaders like Amazon, Netflix, and Meta operate in many languages. Actually, small and midsize businesses often work in many languages as well.
A business doesn’t need to be global to want to be accessible to speakers of many languages. It’s enough to be in a Spanish-speaking region of the U.S. or a French-speaking region of Canada. Cities like New York and San Francisco are homes to culturally diverse populations who speak hundreds of languages (Mandarin, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian, Polish, and more).
The business world — meaning service providers, professionals, and customers — is multilingual. It’s crucial to ensure that your message doesn’t get lost in translation. That’s where language testing comes in. The Harvard Business Review suggested that the best practices that lead to a company’s success are people-centric. Bilingual Pay Programs are a great example. How can you put people at the center of your practices without ensuring that the language you use is crystal clear?
Keep Them Coming Back
Customer retention is key to any organization’s success, which makes a whole lot of sense. Converting someone who knows nothing about your services into a paying client or customer is far more difficult than getting someone to keep coming back for more.
But customer relationships, like personal relationships, require maintenance and clear communication. Whether the team member in question is a salesperson, a customer support representative, a manager, or anyone else, a lapse in messaging can deteriorate quickly into bad reviews, loss of customers, loss of revenue, and more.
One of the best ways to keep employees, clients, and customers all coming back for more is by guaranteeing that you’re utilizing top-notch language skills. Language proficiency testing ensures that your customer relationships remain strong – and that your brand retains trust among your customers.
Global Communication Practices Matter
For global industries, language learning and proficiency matters even more. Many global organizations have offices in multiple areas of the world. The technological advances of the past few years allow for a more widespread workforce than ever.
For those of us who do business globally, language learning (and, therefore, language testing) is non-negotiable. It’s not just making sure you don’t make a typo in a German memo—it’s about idioms, turns-of-phrase, and cultural norms that a truly proficient speaker understands and employs.
The technology exists to support a global business, but to really go global it’s imperative that teams who interact across borders have the skills to do so without creating communication chaos.
Language skills are key to a business’ success in a fast-paced, multicultural modern world. But how can organizations be sure that someone who says they’re fluent really speaks and reads fluently? Language testing takes the uncertainty and risk out of multilingual hiring for any business model.