Review

Lit Review

This research is focused on the speech accommodation strategies in the selling of life insurance. The authors tries to show both the sellers and buyers how they use accommodation strategies to ensure or decline a sale. The past studies had found that people in International Business meetings are aware to adjust their language to meet the needs of a diverse international audience. For this study, the author investigates the use of language in life insurance sales meetings. They try to find out if both the seller and buyer of life insurance sales were aware of the need of adjusting their communication style or language, according to the needs of their listeners in order to achieve the communication goal.

Method

This study is a non-experimental and descriptive study. Observations and initials analysis were used for this research. Data was collecting from three life insurance personal selling meetings in Malaysia. They recorded each meeting and each of them were thirty to fifty minutes long.

Results

They found that insurance agents put in a lot of effort to explain the features of life insurance. East Asian communicators understood the receiver might be fearful to ask questions, since questions can be intercepted negatively. Insurance Agents sales must fulfil the needs of the customers by making sure the buyers have all of the information they need before the sale is completed. The Insurance Agents are trained to deal with customers who do not like asking questions. They always try to provide extra information to get their point across for both the sale process and future endeavors.

Discussion

There were a few points the author was trying to make in this article. First of all, was trying to intervene in what may go wrong with Insurance Sales meetings while dealing with linguistic differences and language barriers. The Author was trying to determine the best way to train Insurance Agents to deal with multilingual customers, and to make sure they get all of the information they need from the sale.

The most important finding of this study was how much can go wrong during a sales process without effective communication, especially between multilingual customers. They found that mutual corporation will be needed for any positive sales process to go through and also emphasizing how important face to face communication is. Also, finding how multilingual customers need more effective communication in order to answer questions both that they may not feel comfortable asking or do not know how to ask.