Jeanette Muldoon's experience in a hospital waiting room a year ago inspired an idea for a way to provide better service to non-English-speaking customers at Investors Savings Bank in Short Hills, N.J.
Ms. Muldoon, a second vice president and assistant training director at the thrift, put together a booklet for employees to use when they need to call an interpreter for a customer but cannot tell which language is being spoken - Hindi or Hindu? Macedonian or Malayalam? Tagalog or Telegu?
The booklet contains the following message translated into 27 languages: Point to your language. An interpreter will be called.
The names and locations of those who can translate - all of them employees of the thrift - are listed next to each language.
"While sitting in that waiting room, I heard at least three different languages I didn't recognize," said Ms. Muldoon, who was there to get her son treatment for an injury.
"I began to wonder what would happen if this person walked into one of our branches," she said. "How do we know what they're speaking if we never heard the language before?"
Such encounters are happening more and more frequently at Investors.
Almost 20% of New Jersey residents are from a foreign country, according to a 2005 survey by the Census Bureau. More than 27% of the state's residents speak a language other than English at home, and of the adults in that group, 24% either cannot speak English or cannot speak it well, the survey found.
"More people are moving here who speak languages other than English," said Robert Cashill, the president and chief executive of the thrift and its $5.5 billion-asset parent company, Investors Bancorp Inc.
Ms. Muldoon said the staff's diversity reflects the multicultural communities Investors Savings serves.
"We have employees who speak these other languages, so there's always a chance we're going to have a customer come in who speaks one of these other languages too," she said.
The thrift distributed Ms. Muldoon's booklet to its 46 branches earlier this month. Employees also can access an electronic copy on their computers.
Ms. Muldoon said there is no way to know how many times it has been used so far, but she has received a lot of positive feedback.
Some of the employees "who are on the list as speaking other languages said it was needed a long time ago," she said.
She worked on the booklet at home in her spare time, getting help with the translations from her colleagues.
She said one of the challenges was figuring out how to include languages like Bengali and Cantonese - which could not be put in a Word document on her computer because they use characters instead of letters.
Mr. Cashill applauded her resourcefulness and said the booklet would improve service.
"This is a terrific example of employee initiative resulting in a significant benefit to our customers," he said. "It also shows that good ideas are all around us. You just have to know where to look."
Investors Savings had distributed a list of bilingual employees for years, in case any customers needed a translator. But Mr. Cashill said the booklet would make it easier for employees to identify less commonly heard languages, helping to eliminate communication barriers and ensure timely service. "Sometimes things are so obvious in hindsight," he said.
The thrift did not set out to find employees fluent in 27 different languages, Mr. Cashill said; it wound up with all that linguistic ability by having hired local residents.
Investors Savings has some brochures and seminars in Spanish, but it does not tout the more extensive multilingual service in its marketing, he said.
That might happen in the future, though. "This capability is a wonderful asset we have here," Mr. Cashill said.
