A Survey Of Bank Language Status From The Perspective Of Language Service

Banks are typical representative of service industry, and both customers and banks pay special attention to the accuracy, precisenes, courtesy and appropriateness of the language when doing business and a slight error may cause economic losses and even conflicts. Therefore, I am writing this article to analyze the present situation of the service language of this special industry after I have collected enough data from the questionaires handed out to more than 20 banks of different sizes located in three different cities of different sizes.Common and necessary languague resources of banking language service is made up of basic pronunciation and grammar and high-level rhetoric and style resources,which all have communication and economic values. Traditional banks and electronic banks provide oral language, written langugage and paralanguage service to customers, whose number are extremely large and who come from all walks of life. In order to be more competitive, banks are trying their best to improve their language service, which has great influence on the loyalty of their customers.According to the survey the majority of bank employees use mandarine and can change to other languages depending on the circumstances. On the basis of cooperation, the majority employees can provide true, detailed, complete and clear language service to their cumstomers. Moat of them use polite language. When they can’t satisfy the customers’ requests, they will refuse and most of them will express apology and use polite language when doing so. If criticised by customers, most of the empolyees will apologize.Besides, voice prompt can provide warning and guidance service to customers. Banks use differenet fonts, colours, sizes and typesettings in paper agreemnts and on electronic screens.As to paralanguage, employees smile more than they use other forms body language. As to bank management, banks has basic language standard for their employees but they provide few language training for their employees. The contents of training are relatively fixed if there are any such trainings.Generally speaking, customers can get the sort of language service they expect. However, only half of the messages are complete when employees provide information such as consumption guidance or conditions of agreements without request fromn customers, but the majority of customers are satisfied with the truth of the information and the way language service is done. Banking language,oral voice prompt of electronic banks excluded, is very professional, so customers think there are too many professional terms in hotline service and agreements, which are difficult for them to fully understand.Customers believe quite a lot of employees use polite language at work though employees themselves think the ratio is even higher. The majority of customers are content with the warning, suggestions, comforts and apologies from bank emloyees, but there is still spce to improve for language service. Customers are quite satisfied with the tone and facial expressions of the employees, but believe ad posters are of little use in providing them business information. Most of the customers think banks should provide language training to their employees to prove their level of language service and expect better language service for special population groups.Problems with banking language service are mainly in the forms of "noncooperation", "impoliteness", and "langugage context disobedience".Many noncooperations result from consideration of the principle of being polite and the quality of language service can only be guaranteed if both are supplementary to each other.Background of the times, customs identity and profession all have influence on language use, so banking language service should adjust to changes. Banks can avoid many problems resulting from language service if they abide by the principles of standard, truth, detail, nondiscrimination, consistency and individuation when communicating with their customers. Language planning and development of language resources are of vital importance to solving problems concerning language service. Central government and bank administration should issue relevant rules and standard for language use within the banking industry. Branches and their employees should alos make relevant plans:to make good language environment, to obey language policy and impose strict supervision and employees should have a correct language awareness and language consciousness. Development of language resources are not just limited to foreign languages, dialects but should also include linguistic knowledge, linguistic techniques and so on.Resources of linguistic knowledge can systematically lead banking language service to a higher level. Banks have not done enough in developing special language resources and therefore should take immediate measures to issue regulations and strengthen the training of employees to solve such problems.