Friday, May 22, 2009

Advice for retalis shops in Vietnam: Promote your language

I just remembered here in the Starbucks in Bangkok what is a main difference between retails shops in Thailand an Vietnam: It's the greeting and the Goodbye.
In Vietnam, everybody says "Hello" or "Good morning" when a foreigner steps in, and "Goodbye", "See you later" (??) or "ByeBye".

In Bangkok your are greeted in Thai with a nice ""Sawatdee Khrab" and if you leave they may say "sawatdee".

While Thais in the bigger cities are able to have a english conversation between Sawatdee Khrab and sawatdee, Vietnamese retail staff is just the opposite.

So my advice: Every tourist and even foreigner business people may know the Vietnamese word for Hello and thank you, maybe Goodbye as well. They love it to hear something they may understand.

And it's makes the Vietnamese language more popular in other countries :-)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

language may be different, but love does not see the language

Tyler (Tuan) Nguyen said...

"Chao" for both hello and goodbye. Or you can say "tam biet" meaning temporarily goodbye or see you later.