For the first time, China has eclipsed the U.K. and New Zealand as the leading point of origin for migrants to Australia. Last week The Sydney Morning Herald reported “the latest migration figures show a record 6350 settlers arrived from mainland China in the four months to October.”
Considering Australia’s migration trends, I was curious whether Australia’s corporations were taking advantage of all these new customers, many of whom arrive in Australia with significant savings.
As an immigrant to Australia myself (from the U.S.) I know there are two complex purchases that are essential to life in a new country: a bank account and a mobile phone. I decided to check out the websites of Australia’s four major banks and two major telcos to see how easy it is to get information about these services in Chinese.
Homepages still call only Australia home
On the Australian (.com.au) homepages of ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, NAB, Westpac, Telstra and Optus, only Commonwealth and NAB provide non-English links to non-English pages.
Homepage real estate is valuable stuff, but so are loyal new customers. Whilst there may be some non-English speakers who click on “Support”, then “Contact Us”, then “Foreign Language Assistance” (as is necessary on the Telstra Small Business site), a homepage link would make things much easier.
In contrast, in the U.S., where Spanish speakers are a huge market, the major banks and telcos all seem to have figured out that it makes sense to include an “En Espanol” link somewhere on their homepages.
Site search tools don’t speak Chinese
Like many users, when I can’t find something on a homepage, I use the site search. Unfortunately, searching for Chinese language information isn't easy.
For example, the first result for a search for the term “Chinese” on the ANZ site is a link to ANZ’s online financial dictionary. It describes the “ethical rather than physical separation of different divisions of a financial or other institution”, or “Chinese walls”. I'm not sure what someone with a limited knowledge of English curious about an ANZ checking account would make of that.
To be fair to ANZ, there are links to Chinese language information (in the form of PDFs) further down the page. But none of the banks’ or telcos’ site search tools seemed to have been optimised for simple searches related to foreign language pages.
So who’s getting it right?
ANZ has a very robust Chinese language site which is readily accessible if you come through the anz.com (not .com.au) homepage. ANZ has a major presence in China, so this site is serving more than the Australian market.
Westpac’s Moving from China microsite provides a comprehensive range of Chinese language information (Chinese speakers, please leave comments if you disagree). Its homepage even features a smiling photo of Westpac CEO Gail Kelly in a branch in China (although the image lacked alt text – I guess double accessibility is one double happiness too far) .
ANZ’s multilingual branches locator is an excellent idea. None of the other banks seems to have anything like it. Its execution isn’t as good as the concept. More detailed branch location information such as map links would help, as well as foreign language telephone/email contacts. I’m also not sure how many non-English speakers would understand what a “multilingual branch locator” is. An SEO strategy would help.
NAB’s foreign language pages and Commonwealth’s Moving to Australia pages are useful as well. Commonwealth deserves special mention as the only bank that includes Indonesian among its foreign language options.
Among the telcos, both Optus and Telstra haven't made foreign language information accessible. Telstra’s Small Business division is the only area within the Telstra site that had non-English text, but as mentioned earlier, it's not visible from the homepage. The Singapore-owned Optus seems to have left its Chinese language skills at home. It was the only site of the six I searched where I couldn’t find any Chinese language information. A search for the word “Chinese” on the Optus site doesn’t return a single document.
I realise I may be missing entire sites that a native Chinese speaker might find easily, but with this quick review it became clear that leading Australian companies are missing a big opportunity. Anyone moving countries, whether for a few years as a student or as a permanent resident, needs information. Winning their loyalty simply by translating site content into their language could be one of the easiest and most valuable investments in web accessibility you can make.