There is a growing need for Japanese staff that can communicate effectively with non-Japanese customers: having the basic customer English skills at the very least means much less stress for sales staff – and higher sales for management! (Japanese translation below)
Below are written the basic customer English phrases I taught to staff members at a high-end boot maker in Osaka. The five staff members could not speak any English other than “hello” and “thank you”, so I decided that the quickest and most enjoyable way to get them speaking English was to do a lot of role-playing.
Each week we would review the previous week’s role-play situations and then learn one or two more situatuions. We studied fourteen different situations from greeting customers, to checking the fit, to paying by cash or credit card. I also included phrases like “I’m sorry could you say that again?” and “What do you mean?” in section 6 for situations in which clerks have trouble understanding customers’ English.
Near the end of the course, I made one long role-play “cunning paper”, as shown below. We spent the last few classes going through the long role-play, and in the last class, each staff member could successfully do the whole role-play with no cunning paper.
In the slides below, the key customer English phrases are highlighted in blue. In this case, the product being sold is boots, but I believe this role-play can be easily adapted to different products.
Posted with Blogsy
Advanced Business English Japan 
Leave a comment