sity and discretionary items, all the way from groceries to home improvement construction materials and everything in between. The economies of whole cities would be at risk of collapse without foreigners: think not only the obvious tourist destinations like Pattaya and Phuket in Thailand, Siem Reap in Cambodia and Da Nang in Vietnam, but even major metropolises like Bangkok and Phnom Penh would be severely affected. So retailers treat this hugely important target customer with special care, right? Wrong. There are a number of reasons why, but to take the next step up, retailers need to do better in a few key areas. The paradox of phone translator apps Getting staff with genuinely good foreign language skills who also want to work on the floor of a retail store (as opposed to, say, hotel management, corporate roles and other more remunerative occupations) is extremely difficult. If you are a Vietnamese or Thai who has been to school and is fluent in English, do you really want to be working in customer service at a supermarket or traipsing around the floor of an appliance superstore? Probably not. At least not without a wage premium. Usually, by far the best foreign language skills a visitor will encounter at a mall is at the mall’s own information desk. Phone translator apps are not the answer: these are slow, clumsy, antisocial process and fraught with the risk of communication error, particularly for Asian languages for which they don’t capture the nuances of conversation, often inserting nuances that don’t exist. Worse, they have also made a lot of people lazy about acquiring genuine foreign language skills, a phenomenon that is evident everywhere in this part of the world: before the advent of these apps, people in service-oriented positions were more highly motivated to learn foreign languages than they are now, when they often just pull their phone out of their pocket and use the translator instead. The cultural norms problem Cultural norms are also an obstacle to retailers serving foreign customers. In retail categories such as appliances and home improvement, retail employees are trained to follow customers closely but silently as they are browsing. This is partly for anti-theft purposes, but there are other reasons too. Where base salaries are supplemented by commissions, which is frequently the case in a variety of discretionary retail categories, the employee is following you because (s)he wants to be the one to carry the selected product to the register to claim the sale. This ‘follow and hover’ behaviour is anathema to foreign consumers, who will only accept being accompanied by an employee in the event of needing assistance and if the employee speaks the customer’s language. Other cultural issues can annoy foreign customers too, for example differences in the culture of line formation and the indifference of retail staff to situations where a customer has brazenly cut into a line to be served out of turn. Indeed, if you ask foreigners what annoys them most when they are shopping, the answer you will often get is “other customers”. Brand ambassadors In many multibrand stores, the staff are representing particular brands, so will only assist you with their particular brand. This is common in the consumer electronics, sporting goods and health and beauty categories, among others. Foreigners will notice this more than locals simply because they are much less accustomed to it. It also creates the impression that a lot of the staff at any one time are idle and unhelpful, since they are sticking to their particular brand zone and won’t come to assist you even if you wave to them. Getting a blank stare or being treated like a problem customer isn’t an uplifting customer experience. Non-existent or dysfunctional self-checkout machines At a supermarket, the checkout experience, if it isn’t smooth, is something that sticks in a customer’s mind long after other quibbles have been forgotten. Long lines are a pain but customers understand and tolerate it so long as there are a lot of active lanes. Unfortunately, some of the major supermarket chains have gotten this completely wrong. Few of the lanes, often only one, are active, and if there are self-checkout stations, they suffer from technology failures that just never seem to get corrected. Among the major problems with them are failures with weight sensors and reading barcodes, but sometimes it isn’t possible to discern what the problem is at all. Irritating as it is, it wouldn’t be so bad if there was a staff person on hand to intervene, but amazingly this is often not the case. Product ignorance While the brand ambassadors might know a lot about their particular brand and promote that one, there are many situations where technical information is desirable, and the staff person simply knows nothing about any of them. This forces the customer to resort to interrogating his phone to get the information. Try buying a pair of running shoes at a single- or multibrand retail store, and you won’t find out much from the employee on the shop floor: they just don’t have the knowledge and usually not the interest either. “Just buy it!” seems to be their motto. This is quickly noticed by foreign customers, who are used to a lot of interaction with staff in particular retail categories where the technical specification of the product is crucial to a good outcome in a comparison shopping situation. Complaining is culturally unacceptable While complaining about products, service and other aspects of the customer experience is accepted and expected elsewhere in the world, it is frowned upon in countries like Thailand and Vietnam where staff fear ‘losing face’ if they are confronted with a situation where they need to problem-solve. Problem-solving itself is not part of the culture either: the education systems in these countries still emphasise rote learning, following strict instructions and deferring to superiors, over thinking, analysing and being personally accountable. Thus, retail staff rarely react to a customer complaint in a manner that assumes the customer might have a good point. While such lack of accountability is usually understood and taken with stoicism by locals, foreigners don’t understand it, which can lead to conflict, frustration and future avoidance of that retailer.   The next step up Companies that train their employees to best-of-class standards generally do better with foreign customers. But too many retailers do poorly when they don’t take the needs and cultural norms of foreign customers seriously. Thailand, for one, is often praised as a premier shopping hub and in some ways it is: great malls, the whole variety of retail brands, the availability of seemingly every product under the sun. Those things almost get you there as a shopping destination, but there is another leg up for retailers: that’s understanding and acting on the needs of their foreign customers.